Two Chefs, Two Cultures, One Phyllo Collaboration

The sixth iteration of piehaus’ counter culture collaboration series marks a quietly momentous turn: for the first time, the series ventures beyond the piehaus kitchen and into the collaborator’s own domain. What emerges from this exchange between Chef Milan Jurkovic and Chef Kelvin Cheung is a meditation on how comfort transcends geography, how memory shapes appetite, and how two distinct culinary lineages can speak the same language through the medium of handcrafted phyllo.

The partnership opens with the Chicago Dip Pie, a creation that finds unexpected kinship between Jurkovic’s Balkan childhood and Cheung’s memories of Chicago’s Italian beef tradition. Smoked beef cheeks meld with Gouda cheese, caramelised onion and house pickle within crispy phyllo, accompanied by beef jus for dipping. It is, at its heart, a conversation about beef and bread and the particular solace they offer, rendered through two different cultures’ understanding of comfort.

Running alongside it are the Little Ube Pies, which celebrate a more direct shared reference: Filipino cuisine filtered through both chefs’ personal connections to Southeast Asian flavours. Ube kajmak cream (the kajmak itself a Balkan element) meets glossy pecans and white chocolate, creating a dessert that honours heritage whilst remaining wholly contemporary in its sensibility.

Counter Culture Evolves

Since its inception, counter culture has functioned as piehaus’ platform for bringing other chefs and creatives into its particular world of phyllo craft. Each edition explores what occurs when different food cultures, different culinary perspectives and different personal histories encounter the piehaus kitchen. Edition 006 extends this premise further, allowing the collaboration itself to travel, to exist across both piehaus in Alserkal Avenue and 852 Bakery, thereby deepening the conversation rather than containing it within a single space.

This geographical expansion speaks to something essential about how genuine collaboration operates: it demands permeability, a willingness to let your world inform theirs and vice versa. Jurkovic and Cheung approached this edition by seeking common ground not through abstraction, but through the specificity of what they genuinely love to eat. The result carries an authenticity that transcends trendiness, the kind of thoughtfulness that marks the difference between a novelty collaboration and something with real substance.

The Chicago Dip Pie and Little Ube Pies will be available for a limited period from 2 to 16 October at both locations, as well as through Liu by Jun’s on Deliveroo, ensuring that this moment of culinary confluence remains accessible beyond the counter itself.

Imagery courtesy of piehaus (@piehaus.dubai).