A Filipino-Hawaiian Bodega Serving Up Musubi and Other Snacks Is Coming to Ravenswood

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Julius Tacadena likes to describe himself as “delusionally optimistic.” It seems apt: he’s opening a restaurant-slash-bodega during the slow season – Chicago winter – less than a year after jumping into the food business and only half a year or so after meeting his business partner. At least he’s bringing island sunshine to the Midwestern dark season: Kanin will offer fast-casual meals and snacks that draw on Tacadena’s Filipino background and Hawaiian upbringing, with a special focus on the compact treat musubi. It opens on March 8 at 5131 N. Damen Avenue.

“Kanin” is Filipino for “rice,” a central part of musubi. Musubi are a Hawaiian twist on Japanese onigiri, featuring a block of rice topped with a protein – the most iconic is grilled Spam – and wrapped with nori seaweed. Kanin will offer Spam musubi in addition to some Filipino twists – one with egg and the sweet sausage longanisa, and another with tempura shrimp and the tamarind-sour flavor of sinigang soup – and a vegetarian tomato jam and egg version. It will also have grilled skewers in bento boxes that spotlight tropical flavors from Hawaii – guava – and the Philippines – calamansi. “Poke bombs” of fish and rice stuffed into the fried tofu skin pocket known as inari round out the main snacks, while Hawaiian mac salad is an essential side and ube banana pudding is available for dessert.

“What I don’t want people to come into Kanin expecting is a very traditional place to get either Filipino or Hawaiian,” Tacadena says. “Hawaii is already a melting pot of cultures” – and Kanin just continues that mixing. “What I really wanted to do was give people a taste of what my upbringing and my culture and more or less my childhood was,” Tacadena says.

He was born in the Philippines but grew up in Hawaii. He ate musubi all the time as a kid – and missed it on the “mainland,” as he calls Chicago, where he went to high school and moved back several years ago. “You can buy musubi for sure,” he says, “but it’s sort of the afterthought.”

In Hawaii, however, they’re ubiquitous. “It’s our equivalent of going to a 7-Eleven and getting a hot dog,” he says. “At every 7-Eleven in Hawaii, there’s a musubi case. And that is the case for any convenience store, any mom-and-pop poke shop – musubi is just on every corner.”

Kanin is Tacadena’s recreation of that kind of mom-and-pop bodega. It will have tropical juices from the Hawaiian brand Aloha Maid, as well as a small retail section with packaged snacks from Hawaii and Tacadena’s own snack mix, Krackish. He wants it to serve students and teachers from Amundsen High School across the street, just as he subsisted on musubi when he was young. “If I was feeling snacky, I could grab one, if I was starving, I could grab three,” he recalls. He wants Kanin to be “accessible” and “a safe place for kids to just go and get something to eat real quick, even in comparison to a McDonald’s meal.” 

Kanin is inside the same building as Side Practice Coffee, the successful first venture into hospitality by Francis Almeda, Tacadena’s partner in Kanin. Almeda is presiding over an ever-growing empire of food businesses in Chicago that spotlight Filipino flavors, partnering with people like Tacadena or Justin Lerias, the baker who’s opening a Filipino-ish bakery called Del Sur down the street, at 4639 N. Damen Avenue.

Tacadena and Lerias both met Tacadena while plugging their fledgling businesses at Side Practice, which hosts regular pop-ups for creators both culinary and crafty. (Tacadena hopes to spotlight some of those creators at Kanin too.) In Tacadena’s case, he was selling his Krackish snack mix, which he launched in May of 2024 as a way to “dip my toe in the water and be in the food industry,” he says. He had worked in restaurants during high school and college and loved food even though he had moved on to a career in tech. The thought behind starting a snack brand was, “It’s not really running a day-to-day restaurant. I can just do it whenever I want to.”

Several months later, he was committing to a day-to-day restaurant.

“I kind of thought [Krackish] would be the end of it, but then I met Francis, who is equally as delusionally optimistic as I am,” he says. “Francis was a stranger to me in August, and I bought a restaurant with him in November,” he says with a laugh.

Almeda was looking for a morning pop-up for Novel Pizza Cafe, the pizzeria he opened in Pilsen last year with his cousin and a friend. Tacadena messaged him with an idea for musubi.

Almeda had already been throwing around the idea of selling musubi but was looking for the right partner; Tacadena was the perfect fit. “It was sort of meant to be,” Tacadena says.  

The space next door to Side Practice, formerly Sweet Virginia’s Kitchen, had been available for some time, and Almeda planted the seed of opening a musubi store with Tacadena there even before they started doing pop-ups. The first Kanin pop-up at Novel Pizza “sold out in 40 minutes or something crazy,” Tacadena recalls. Subsequent weekly pop-ups at Side Practice continued to sell out quickly. That proved the viability of the idea, so Tacadena and Almeda decided to dive in and take over the lease next door to open Kanin as a brick and mortar shop.

“When you meet someone and you align with the same vision, you have the same ideals, and you believe in each other, that fuels the fire,” says Tacadena. “Me and him alone like to move fast; you put both of us together, it’s a bonfire.”

He has big ideas for Kanin, including eventually offering the raw fish dish poke; bottling flavored coffees to go; and expanding into the set Hawaiian lunch format known as plate lunch. But things have moved fast; he has plenty of time to figure all that out.

“It’s surreal we’re even talking about this,” he says.

Kanin will be open from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm during its opening weekend of March 8-9. Following that, normal hours are 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, Tuesday to Sunday.