Umebroshi Pop-Up Brings Hawaiian Cuisine to Bar 140 in Shelton

Homemade spam in corndog form? Gimme.

Greeting someone in Connecticut with an enthusiastic “Aloha!” or flashing them with a very chill hang loose hand gesture isn’t really our deal in the Nutmeg State. But on Tuesday afternoons at Bar 140, it’s totally rad to let out your inner Hawaiian during Umebroshi Food’s weekly pop-up.

 I’m aware that you probably have questions, the first of which is “what the hell is an Umebroshi?” Umebroshi, however, is not an actual word, but “umeboshi” is. Simply put, it’s a salted sour brined Japanese plum that offers a ton of health benefits. Look it up yourself. That’s not really what we’re here for. Long story short, Japanese infusion is pretty common in Hawaiian cuisine for reasons of immigration. The chefs behind this particular pop-up at cooking Hawaiian food and they’re guys, so “UmeBROshi” is a play on words. There’s even a rumor around (thanks, Jeff Spencer) that this play on words goes further, as in the name was thought up by the two chefs behind Umebroshi because when coming up with it, they simply said, “you” (U) “me” “bro” “shiii” (a cool way to say “shit”).

The bowls provide a myriad of flavors and sensations. Creamy and cold. Crispy, sweet, garlicky, and sour. Vinegary and spicy. Pictured is the Mochicko Chicken Bowl (shio koji chicken thigh, furikake rice, kimchi, macaroni salad, gochujang mayo, cherry li’hing, scallion, fried garlic) alongside an order of spam musubi rolls.

Whew! Now that we’ve got that part square, it’s time you “meet them.” And believe me, you’ll run to try their food soon after, because there’s honestly nothing like Umebroshi anywhere around here.

The “bros” I speak of are Kyle Sorenson and Rob Haidar. If their names ring a bell, there’s a chance you’ve eaten at the places they each cook at. Sorenson works at Brushmill by the Waterfall in Chester, while Haidar does his thing at Foundry Kitchen and Tavern in Sandy Hook.

But before their current gigs, the two met in Bethel at Jeff Taibe’s Taproot, where the idea for Umebroshi Food was dreamt up.

Left to right: Rob Haidar, Kyle Sorenson, and Vincent Sheehan. “We’re two youngish cooks trying to pave our own path,” Sorenson says. “We respect the guys we’ve come up under, but we’d like to be in charge of our own spot. This is a good avenue to get there.”

“We both worked under Jeff at Taproot,” Haidar says. “We were pretty much sparked by the Asian flavors we used there and slowly eased into Hawaiian food. We’d all hang out together and go to bars, but we also hang out at my apartment. We’d bring ingredients to cook for each other on a night off. One night it’d be pizza, another night it’d be Lebanese food. We had fun. One night I made spam musubi and that further sparked my interest in Hawaiian food. Kyle started to get into it, too, and we got some cookbooks to research. One day we said, ‘let’s start something.’”

According to Sorenson, the research and development for Umebroshi took a solid year and a half. He mentioned they’d often have to make everything a handful of times or more to get it to where they wanted it, including making their dishes look aesthetically pleasing in addition to being flavorful.

Yes, those rolls are tempura fried!

In addition to Japanese, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese influences are highly present in Hawaiian cuisine. The reason? Due to labor demands, immigrant workers brought to Hawaii to work on sugarcane and pineapple plantations. They brought their culture along, too, obviously.

Spam musubi roll up close. What’s rolled is Umebroshi’s homemade spam, fluffy Japanese omelet style eggs, sushi rice. On the outside is a drizzle of kewpie mayo, scallions, and fried garlic. Umami punch will knock you the fuck out.

When Umebroshi was ready to rock, it began as a pre order takeout spot that the guys ran on industry day off, aka Mondays, out of Haidar’s apartment in Danbury. Sorenson described it as a “takeout pop-up that was mostly on the DL (that’s DOWN LOW if you needed acronym assistance).” Often times, their menu of mostly small apps, some cold apps, resulted in a sellout.

In the early stages of Umebroshi, Sorenson and Haidar got major support from Haidar’s boss, Clark Neugold, who lived in Hawaii for a long stretch. “On our first day, Clark came to support us and ordered one of everything,” Haidar says. “He said, ‘Dude, I ate it and it reminded me of being back on the islands.’ Everyone always asks if we’ve been to Hawaii, but no, we haven’t. Our mentality, and from working with Jeff, and what his mentality is, we don’t want to put out shit. We dive into it, dive into the ingredients, and if it’s not right we will figure it out.”

This is beer food for damn sure. The bar at Bar 140 has you covered in that department.

Grilled cheese, please!

The natural transition from a pop-up and from experimenting on their days off was to take Umebroshi Food to the next level, as in not slinging musubi rolls, bowls, and macaroni salad out of Haidar’s apartment. But before they could think about renting a commercial kitchen, buying food truck, or a bigger picture brick-and-mortar, they took their pop-up over to the renovated Bar 140 in Shelton and held their first kitchen takeover there on December 5, 2022.

Since early December, Sorenson and Haidar have been serving up fun, umami packed Hawaiian inspired fare like spam corndogs, grilled cheese stuffed with homemade kimchi, Cantonese lap cheong sausage fried rice, and bowls (smoked pork, chicken, or smoked tofu) that’ll give you damn near every taste sensation that exists.

“Bartenders do their thing to make a creative cocktail list to go with the food,” Haidar says. “I love picklebacks, so I’d like to do some kind a Hawaiian pickleback with spicy pickled pineapple and Jamo or something.”

Right: Jasmine Apology - Four Roses Bourbon, jasmine tea, grapefruit, elderflower.
Left: Midnight Sake - Roku Gin, orange marmalade, lemon, sparkling sake

Oh, you better believe there’s a burger. Recently, the burger had a different look as it was a single four ounce patty stacked with mochicko chicken, katsu sauce, pickles, onion, and Japanese curry cheese sauce.

It’d be easy to say, “order it all.” And you should try as much as you can handle, then go back another Tuesday to fill in the blanks. But if there are “musts,” you should begin with the corndogs, the homemade spam version (kimchi power dusted, kewpie mayo drizzle, and topped off with scallions and fried garlic), and the snappy casing lap cheong sausage that’s stuffed with mozzarella, then battered dipped, coated in crushed up Funyuns, and served with spicy mustard. On the table with the dogs should be the spam musubi rolls, a day one dish that was part of their Taproot supper club at Haidar’s apartment.

If you’re sticking to the theme of handhelds, the kimchi grilled cheese packs a buttery, vinegary, spicy bite. The cheeses used are straight up gooey American and mimolette, a cheese made from cow’s milk that’s a bright orange color that it gets from annatto seeds. The melty cheeses, the meaty oyster mushrooms, and plenty of furikake butter spread on sourdough and griddled nice and toasty on the flat top make for a memorable sandwich. Your mom’s grilled cheese pales in comparison.

On the night we visited Umebroshi, they debuted a wildly creative double smashburger stacked with crunchy napa coleslaw, salty adobo pickles, a fermented then smoked pineapple slice, and a tempura fried nori “pocket” of rice. Much like most of what’s happening on Umebroshi’s menu, you surely won’t find this burger anywhere else.

When you’re reading their online menu trying to decide, you’ll inevitable be stumped as to what these ingredients are. It’s why the guys created a Cliffs Notes-like tab on their website titled “WTF AM I EATING.” Lean on that.

A couple desserts, like this haupia bar, always make the menu. Set in a coconut cracker crust then layered with Okinawa purple sweet potato and haupia (Hawaiian coconut pudding).

As for some of those ingredients, they’re sourced from a bunch of different places.

“We have ingredients spots like H Mart in Hartsdale, where we can get a lot of this stuff and a few random local places,” Haidar explains. “We use Community Shellfish in Bethel for bluefin tuna that’s shipped down from Maine, then seasonally we get Faroe Island salmon. The spam we make is from pork shoulder, smoked ham, and bacon. We might eventually try duck spam or something more off the cuff.”

As far as what’s to come from Umebroshi Food, Haidar teased the possibility of a tasting/drink pairing experience and mentioned that the fried rice dish will switch up often.

But the bigger goal according to Sorenson and Haidar is to keep progressing from a pop-up to possibly a food truck, and if all goes well, a small space similar to the size of Taproot where Umebroshi was essentially born.

Haidar, though, says he has one more goal as it relates to Umebroshi.

“One of the end games of this is to hand Tony Hawk a spam corndog and have him eat it on the spot.”

We’re pretty sure Tony’s gonna love that joint.

So, if anyone reading this knows Tony, let’s make this happen!

Tuesdays at 5 p.m. at Bar 140
140 Center Street; Shelton
umebroshi.com