UPDATE: This event is Sold Out.

Friendly Fire is Puma’s ongoing guest chef series, an open invitation for cooks, friends, and collaborators we admire to take over the kitchen for one night. Reservations only, book here.

For this edition, Chef Will Branch of Paper Sons brings a special menu inspired by his family history, his craft, and his deeply personal approach to Chinese-American cooking, interpreted through Puma’s fire-driven kitchen. Chef Will is the founder of Detroit’s acclaimed Corridor Sausage and the chef behind Paper Sons, an upcoming modern Chinese-American restaurant shaped by family history, smoke, live fire, dim sum, and the craft of barbecue.

Chef Will’s food is built through craftsmanship, patience, and respect for the whole animal, the ingredients, and the process. Smoking, curing, butchery, charcuterie, and live fire are not shortcuts to intensity; they are patient, time-tested ways to build flavor, drawing from both classic Chinese cooking and the traditions of American barbecue.

The name Paper Sons comes from Will’s own family history. His ancestors came to America during the Chinese Exclusion Act as “paper sons,” using paper identities and claimed family ties to start new lives, while carrying forward what traditions they could. It is a story of survival, reinvention, and making a life in the space between what was carried forward and what had to be remade.

At Paper Sons, that history becomes food: Chinese-American flavors, Texas-style barbecue, smoke, memory and the joy of gathering around a table. For one night, Paper Sons and Puma come together for a feast shaped by smoke, fire, memory, and abundance.

The menu moves through dim sum, bright seafood, herbs, sauces and live fire before culminating in a whole pig roast feast shared across the room. Generous, celebratory and abundant.

Join us for an evening of food, drinks, fire, and creative exchange.

Reservations and more info here.

食好飲好 (eat good, drink good)