Mia Orino and Carlo Gan founded Kamayan ATL in 2018 to reconnect with the food of their native Philippines and the small population of Filipino people living around Atlanta. They named the pop-up after a traditional feasting style in the Philippines called “kamayan” where those gathered spread food along a table dressed from end-to-end with verdant banana leaves. Groups of people then stand or sit around the table and use sticky rice and their hands to scoop up bites of food.
“Kamayan is coming together with the people you love and trust the most or have a strong bond with. Everything is eaten with your hands,” Orino explained. “It’s very communal and that’s important to Filipino people. The name fit for many reasons.”
Community has been at the heart of the Buford Highway Filipino restaurant since it operated as a pop-up serving from a subdivision clubhouse in metro Atlanta nearly seven years ago.
Within months of those first clubhouse pop-ups, Orino and Gan found themselves serving Filipino dishes like shrimp and pork lumpia (fried spring rolls), bowls of pancit bihon (noodles), and lechon kawali (crispy pork belly) at restaurants such as Ba Bellies, A Mano, and Lazy Betty. Most diners they encountered at the Kamayan ATL pop-ups were non-Filipinos, Orino said, and many times not of Asian descent.
Even during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when Orino and Gan struggled to keep the pop-up going, diners continued to show up for their food.
“Those early pop-up days showed us how diverse Atlanta is and how much people here want to support each other and learn. Atlantans are adventurous eaters,” Orino said.
They had planned on opening Kamayan ATL as a restaurant in a century-old house in Kirkwood close to their home in Decatur. The bungalow included a koi pond similar to one found at Orino’s childhood home in Manilla. But the build-out proved too costly on the property. They soon found a restaurant space at the iconic Asian Square restaurant and retail complex on Buford Highway in Doraville.
Kamayan ATL opened as a restaurant in 2022. Lines snaked out the front door and reservations stayed booked for weeks. The James Beard Foundation recognized Orino and Gan as semifinalists for Emerging Chef that same year. In 2023, Michelin placed Kamayan ATL in its inaugural dining guide to Atlanta.
The kamayan feast has become the restaurant’s calling card.
The design for Kamayan ATL centers on the community, too, including walls decorated with artwork from friends and local and national Filipino artists and photographers. An ornate scarf owned by Orino’s mother hangs framed near the prep area and counter in back.
Punctuating the room is a replica of a bahay kudo; a traditional house indigenous to the Philippines. Built on stilts and made from natural materials like bamboo, friends, family, and the community help construct the house for their neighbor by hand. When the neighbor decides to move, that same community returns to help, hoisting the house upon their shoulders and carrying it to its next location.
At Kamayan ATL, the bahay kudo hosts up to 20 people for kamayan feasts. It’s a rare week when the restaurant doesn’t have a kamayan booked in the bahay kudo.
What is a kamayan?
Kamayan means ″by hand” in the Filipino Tagalog dialect with dishes laid out upon large green banana leaves spread across long tables like a buffet. People host kamayans on beaches, in their homes, or places suitable for sizable groups dining together throughout the archipelago’s nearly 8,000 islands.
While it’s most often and traditionally referred to as a kamayan, some Filipino communities call the feast a “boodle fight.” The slang term was first coined during the American occupation of the Philippines in the early 20th century. Filipino troops ate kamayan style, regardless of rank, because the meal was easy to set up wherever they were based for the day and to feed big groups without utensils. Sometimes the meal would turn into an eating contest.
Whether called kamayan or boodle fight, the communal aspect of the meal remains its central tenet.
Orino and Gan used to offer a kamayan option as part of the regular restaurant menu, but the preparation is labor intensive. Cooking multiple dishes and designing and laying out the feast can take between four and six hours from start to finish. The restaurant now offers the kamayan as a catering option and for private dining in the bahay kudo. The largest kamayan spread the restaurant prepared fed nearly 300 people. It took an entire day to prepare, even with a team of employees and volunteers.
How to eat a kamayan
The kamayan at Kamayan ATL features at least 12 dishes, along with plenty of rice and dipping sauces. You eat fruits like mangos, jackfruit, and kiwis and pickled vegetables between bites as palate cleansers.
To eat, you scoop up glutinous sticky rice from the table using four fingers, making an indentation in the middle with your thumb. Next, you compose the bite with other ingredients, like tender pork and bits of fish or longganisa (sausage). Mash down the bite, top it with sauce, and pop it into your mouth.
Other dishes like lumpia, thick cubes of crispy lechon kawali (pork belly), and giant prawns don’t require rice. You often just make up how you want to eat food on the table as you go along, Orino said.
“We just want to feed you,” she said. “So there’s no judgement on how you eat, but with rice and by hand is easiest and the best way to enjoy a kamayan.”
Kamayan ATL does provide chopsticks when asked.
Kamayan dish highlights
Lumpia (fried spring rolls stuffed with pork, shrimp, or vegetables)
Pancit Bihon-Canton (rice and wheat noodles tossed with stir-fried vegetables)
Ube puto (steamed purple yam rice cake)
Lechon kawali (thick cubes of crispy fried pork belly)
Vegan kare-kare (peanut stew with bokchoy, eggplant, and green beans)
Whole fried pompano
Barbecue chicken or pork skewers
Whole barbecue shrimp skewers (head- and tail-on)
Crispy pata (deep-fried pork leg)
Booking a private kamayan
While catering is available, the restaurant offers private kamayans in the bahay kudo on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays after 5:30 p.m. for 10 or more people. It’s $75 per person and $37.50 per child up to 12 years old. Kamayan ATL provides fresh juices and tea. People can also BYOB.
Asian Square, 5150 Buford Highway, Doraville. Thursday, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 12 p.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday, 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. Reservations highly encouraged.