“Filipino Friday” is the opposite of traditional. Synthesizing her high-end pastry skills with comforting flavors from childhood has sparked a meaningful dialogue, both with herself and with her customers. I don’t know where I fit.”Īfter years of struggling, the chef has found her conduit in the kitchen, allowing her talents to guide a slow-but-steady march toward understanding. “You have your feet in both worlds, but you never feel like you belong to either one.
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“I don’t know how to feel Filipino,” said Melanie. It’s a dynamic familiar to many culturally American children of immigrants - a practice well-intentioned and born of protection, but one that puts a serious strain on the individual pursuit of identity. Traveling to the Northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna in 2001 to attend a music workshop, she fell hard for real-deal gelato, and began experimenting with her own using a $50 Cuisinart ice cream maker.
A classical saxophonist, she earned a degree in music education from Michigan State University, where she and Liz, a percussionist, first met.īoth women would go on to teach band in schools all over Liz’s native Chicago, but the seed for Melanie’s gestating pivot was planted in her undergrad years. The product of a Filipino multigenerational family that first emigrated to America in the 1960s, Melanie grew up in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, her Midwestern lilt an outlier in the Kenzo-ese chorus that soundtracks her adopted neighborhood.
“I’ve been telling people I’m Italian forever.” “I’m a 40-year-old woman, and I’m just coming out as Filipino now,” the native Michigander joked as she knifed the kernels off local corn she’d purchased at Riverwards Produce, a few blocks away from Flow State’s year-old Kensington storefront. To join the conversation, all one needs to do is swing by on a “Filipino Friday.” That’s the one day a week she sets aside to find out who she is, in a way that makes sense to her. Flow State is her chance to change that - at her own pace, on her own terms, and in a language that anyone with a sweet tooth already speaks. In spite of her own Filipino heritage, Melanie has always felt like an outsider, too. It’s a popular ingredient found in the desserts of the Philippines, one that many non-Asian bakers are just beginning to discover. But there’s another factor in play here, one that’s less obvious but far more intimate: the ube, or purple yam, that gives the treats their Instagrammable hue. They quickly landed on a name for this new snack: the “victory roll,” a double entendre nodding to both Melanie’s scratch-made dough spirals and her favorite follicular flourish.
The moment she emerged from the small kitchen of Flow State CoffeeBar (2413 Frankford Ave., brandishing a batch of purple yam cinnamon buns, her business partners - Melanie’s wife, Liz Diamond-Manlusoc, and longtime friend Maggie Lee - stated the obvious. But the second she pulled her handiwork out of the oven, she had to admit the resemblance was uncanny.įor years, the pastry chef has rocked the same coiffure: close-cropped on the sides, with the much longer, violet-tinted mop up top swept up and back in a ’40s pinup loopty-loop. Melanie Diamond-Manlusoc wasn’t trying to coordinate her desserts with her ’do.
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