Cambodia on a Plate, as Rendered by a Frenchman

Though contemporary in presentation, Joannès Rivière's Sanday fish is made with Cambodian ingredients and incorporates eggplant cooked in a palm sugar braise.

Born in Roanne to a restaurateur and farmer who supplied fresh vegetables to Michelin-starred La Maison Troisgros, Mr. Rivière studied cooking in France and worked with pastry in the United States for three years before moving to Siem Reap in 2003 to teach cooking to underprivileged Cambodian youth.

The interior of Cuisine Wat Damnak, located in a converted bungalow.

Vendors at Psar Chas, a market in Siem Reap where Mr. Rivière buys ingredients.

August 30, 2012
By Robyn Eckhardt
The Wall Street Journal

Consider Joannès Rivière’s Sanday fish dish as his version of Cambodia on a plate.

Though it appears borne out of a contemporary European kitchen, the French-born 32-year-old chef insists it’s pure Cambodian, featuring fish from the Tonle Sap, the country’s main waterway, and eggplant cooked in a traditional palm-sugar khaw braise.

Mr. Rivière moved to Cambodia in 2003 to teach cooking to underprivileged youth. Born in Roanne to a restaurateur and farmer who supplied fresh vegetables to Michelin-starred La Maison Troisgros, Mr. Rivière studied cooking in France and worked with pastry in the United States for three years before moving to Siem Reap in 2003 to teach cooking to underprivileged Cambodian youth.

In 2005, he became executive chef at Siem Reap’s luxe Hotel de la Paix, a post he left in 2010 to open Cuisine Wat Damnak, an upscale restaurant with a relaxed vibe in a converted bungalow.

Cambodian fare steps up a notch

January 1, 2012
STEVEN A. ROSENBERG
Boston Globe (Massachusetts, USA)

Apsara Angkor Restaurant

• 877 Western Ave., Lynn
• 781-477-6045
• Open Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. ; Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to midnight
• Credit cards accepted
• Accessible to the handicapped

For years, the Cambodian restaurant Mittapheap, just blocks away from Lynn’s General Electric plant on Western Avenue, served as an oasis to Cambodian natives and adventurous Americans who wanted home-cooked Cambodian fare without driving to Boston.

Enter Sokhoeun Chea, who lives a few blocks from the restaurant and was a regular at Mittapheap in between his management jobs at a department store and a night club. Chea, who is 48, survived the Killing Fields in Cambodia, and lived in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before arriving in Revere. There, he persuaded school officials to allow him to go to high school - and despite being 20 and sitting in a classroom for the first time in his life, he learned how to read, write, and speak English.

“This is my second life in America. This is my heaven,’’ explained Chea on a chilly evening last week in Lynn. Chea purchased the restaurant property on Dec. 1, and since then he has tinkered with Mittapheap’s extensive, formerly 50-page menu - slimming down some of the repetitive offerings, such as meat-based soups - while sitting with customers and conducting his own research. He says his management experience has taught him that the customer comes first and is always right.

Floating Rock: You should Khmer

ROCK SOLID: Relocated from Revere, Floating Rock’s new digs in Cambridge’s Central Square are impressive. (Photo by Matthew West)

Friday, June 17, 2011
By Mat Schaffer
Boston Herald (Massachusetts, USA)

Floating Rock, the Cambodian restaurant in Revere that became a cult favorite of many Hub foodies, has relocated to fancy new digs in Central Square with mixed results.

The menu has been truncated. The predominantly Western waitstaff is well-intentioned, but not of much assistance when it comes to helping you order. And price-wise, the new Floating Rock is considerably more expensive than comparable eateries. Then again, there’s a full bar, lengthy cocktail, wine and beer lists, and the place is gorgeously decorated in earthen tones with long upholstered banquettes and carved sculptures.

If you’re new to Cambodian — or Khmer — cuisine, you will find it similar to the cuisines of neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. Rice is a staple. Lots of stir-fries and curries. Lots of vegetables — often raw. And Cambodian fare makes frequent use of a fermented fish paste called prahok, which has a distinctive, salty flavor.

The Elephant Walk chefs share their history in the restaurant business and an easy family Ecuadorian−style soup recipe

Nadsa and Lonteine de Monteiro prepare French-Cambodian cuisine at Boston’s renowned The Elephant Walk. (Courtesy Nadsa de Monteiro)

How to make avocado citrus soup, Ecuadorian style

Monday, October 4, 2010
By Jon Cheng
The Tufts Daily (Tufts Univ., Medford, Massachusetts, USA)

Nadsa de Monteiro and her mother Longteine de Monteiro, chef−owners of the Massachusetts restaurant chain The Elephant Walk, claim that their family was the first to bring Cambodian cuisine to Boston when The Elephant Walk opened in 1991.

The restaurant gained renown almost immediately - Esquire Magazine named it one of America's Best New Restaurants in 1992 - but the de Monteiros attribute the restaurant's success to the decades of hardship they experienced before its establishment.

Nadsa, who oversees operations of the restaurant's three branches, said The Elephant Walk's menu, which she calls "three parts Cambodian and one part French," derives directly from her family's background.

Though she was born in Cambodia, her father's work as a diplomat and ambassador brought her to Yugoslavia, the Philippines and Taipei before her family was finally forced to take asylum in France to escape massacres brought on by the Khmer Rouge's takeover of the Cambodian government in 1975, she said. Nadsa's grandmother and uncle were among the fatalities in the country's infamous "Killing Fields" period.

It was in France where her affinity for French cuisine developed, Nadsa said, and where her mother began cooking.

"Before France, my mother has always been the ambassador's wife, so she didn't have to cook," Nadsa said, but when they moved to France, her mother taught herself how to cook in order to preserve the family's standard of living. "My sister and I, when we came home from school, had an amazing spread of food that she prepared."

Soon after her move to France, Nadsa moved again - this time to the United States to work as a travel agent - while her parents stayed in France, hoping to immigrate eventually but having been denied refugee status.

In the meantime, Longteine quickly became a skilled culinarian and decided to turn cooking into a profession. She pawned her jewelry to open up a restaurant, Amrita, which saw success during its 10−year run. After Nadsa became a naturalized citizen, Longteine and Nadsa's father were finally able to move to the United States and they left Amrita behind. Upon their reunion, Nadsa was drawn into the culinary world, "mostly by necessity and mostly by chance," she said.

"Until my parents moved here, I never cooked. Then, I got sucked into the restaurant business," Nadsa said. "So I went to get culinary training in France [under Michelin−starred chef Yves Thuris], but I also learned from eating my mother's food."

After graduating from the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and working as sous−chef at The Elephant Walk for two years, Nadsa succeeded her mother as executive chef. From then on, the restaurant's success has been overwhelming, she said.

"We've been receiving the Best of Boston award every year for the last 10 years. Just last year we were inducted in the magazine's Hall of Fame," she said. "We have also published an ‘Elephant Walk' cookbook that is being sold in bookstores and on Amazon.com."

Once a week, Nadsa holds a Saturday morning cooking class with her mother and brother−in−law chef Gerard Lopez that usually draws in eight to 18 people.

"We've had couples, even teenagers take the class - the youngest one being nine years old and the oldest one 81 years old," she said.

Due to the establishments' proximity to nearby colleges, the classes and restaurants alike tend to attract a lot of students. But the family still strives to further spread the culture of their food to younger generations.

"Don't be afraid to taste new things; be adventurous. Hamburgers, fries and pizza aren't the only things - Boston now has tons of ethnic foods. If you're limiting your scope, that's your own problem," Nadsa said.

To help, she offers a simple recipe for a chilled avocado citrus soup, which students can easily whip up in their own kitchens (see page 3).

"This is a recipe that was inspired by one of my trips to Ecuador," Nadsa said. "I brought it back, played with it, recreated it and put it on the menu five years ago. It's just a big hit and everybody just loved it. I get requests for it all the time. Anybody can make this. If you can't make it, you're an idiot."

Earthy and aromatic Cambodian flavors top their Thai counterparts

Fried tilapia (All photos: Hugo Kugiya)
Num banh chuk

Tola Kruy behind the counter at Queen's Deli

May 20, 2010
By Hugo Kugiya
Crosscut.com

Eating on the Edge: At the family-owned Queen's Deli in White Center, let trust and curiosity be your guides.

The day I ate Cambodian food for the first time also happened to be the day of White Center Spring Clean 2010. Volunteers wearing purple T-shirts spent a Saturday in May cleaning and beautifying the streets and public spaces in the transforming, unincorporated neighborhood on a hilltop south of downtown Seattle.

Part of neither Seattle nor Burien, the two cities that border it, White Center is the petri dish of our civic aspirations, a somewhat isolated, urban community plotted with the best intentions, the kind of place many who live in Seattle probably wish the city was like: still small enough to allow for the effort of the individual, but big enough to stand for something.

King County spent $15 million here over the last five years to repair storefronts, restore a park, install wireless Internet, build new sidewalks and a community center, and finance the construction of the Greenbridge project, a mixed-income housing complex that replaced distressed and dangerous public housing originally built to temporarily shelter Boeing workers.

Beset by poverty for decades, White Center was that invisible, avoided place, of interest to few with political or cultural power. As it often happens in places like White Center, immigrants to the city settled here: Somalis, Ethiopians, Mexicans, El Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Russians, and Cambodians. Block for block, it is undoubtedly one of the most diverse places in King County, and a great bet for eating.

The spiritual and cultural heart of the Seattle area’s Cambodian community is in White Center, one of many places across the country where Cambodian immigrants have landed since 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime fell from power, the country’s genocide ended, and its refugees started settling in the U.S.

According to U.S. Census data, most Cambodian Americans live in California and Massachusetts, followed by Washington state. One of the few museums in the world devoted to the history of Cambodia’s “killing fields,” (referring to the genocide of 1 million to 2 million Cambodians following the end of the Vietnam War) started in White Center, although it has been temporarily relocated to the Wing Luke museum in Seattle's Chinatown.

None of this was on my mind the weekend afternoon I visited the Queen’s Deli, one of the few Cambodian restaurants in the Seattle area. I was preoccupied with the dearth of Cambodian dining options (despite the number of immigrants in the area), a curious circumstance given the number of Vietnamese and Thai restaurants in the city — Cambodia shares borders as well as plenty of cultural DNA with Thailand and Vietnam. Thai food in particular is so ubiquitous, it is nearly as emblematic of Seattle as salmon and teriyaki.

The Kirirom Restaurant & Bakery in Lynnwood recently closed, and a pho restaurant replaced it. That leaves the Phnom Penh Noodle House in Chinatown as the only other option around here, although Phnom Penh is more of a hybrid of Cambodian, Thai and Chinese.

Queen’s Deli has the distinction of being surrounded by other Cambodian businesses and being patronized mostly by Cambodian immigrants. A few blocks away, the largest grocery in the neighborhood, the Samway market, is owned by the Yim family, from Cambodia by way of Louisiana. The Queen’s Deli is owned by the Kruy family — husband Chengtay, wife Chamtong and their adult son Tola, 23, who grew up near Phnom Penh but attended high school in Kent and is now a student at Highline Community College. The Kruys opened Queen’s Deli less than two years ago.

Tola said the restaurant's name refers to his mom, who does all the cooking and runs the kitchen. "My parents wanted to give the restaurant a Cambodian name, but I didn't want to do that," he said. "I didn't want people to think the food was just for Cambodian people."

While tables are abundant, the restaurant is more of a takeout joint. Women come to buy bags of sweet rolls and other baked goods. Families order ahead for trays of fried noodles for birthday parties. Men grab sandwiches made with grilled pork and baguettes — Cambodia or Kampuchea (an older, more faithful English transliteration) was formerly a French protectorate — wrapped in butcher paper. The restaurant has plenty of pre-made food to go: hot-out-of-the-oil rice-flour donuts; colorful, gelatinous sweets; a Cambodian version of a hambao, stuffed with mushrooms, onions, and pork; and various noodles and sautéed dishes kept in hot trays behind the counter.

But for those with a little time, the most rewarding dishes are those made to order. Dishes are constructed from scratch and take some time in the small kitchen. The best among them are soups and stews that share hints of similarity with Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian food. Bright aromatics like ginger and lemongrass are part of the cuisine as are peppery herbs, rice noodles and curries. Cambodian food is less spicy and sweet than Thai food. But if the difference between Cambodian food and other Asian food can be reduced to one ingredient, it would be prahok.

Prahok is to Khmer cooking — Khmer also refers to the language of Cambodia and to its people — what fish sauce is to Thai cooking. It is fish paste, made from the gutted, scaled, salted, fermented remains of various freshwater fish. It is a pale, pinkish grey in color and possesses a pungent aroma that gives Khmer food a deep, earthy flavor. The flavors of the Thai food we consume locally seem elementary by comparison. Prahok is used in most Khmer dishes, as a base of flavor to build on.

The dishes at Queen’s Deli cost $7 or less. The menu contains some photographs that are of some help to those new to Cambodian food. Otherwise, a certain trust and sense of curiosity are the best guides. Friendly and helpful, Tola is also happy to explain the menu and inform your choices.

He is likely to suggest num banh chuk ($6), ribbons of thin rice noodles served in a pale-colored sauce, made with prahok, ground lemongrass and spices that impart a subtle, curry-like flavor. The sauce is soupy in consistency but dense with flavor. Mixed into the sauce is ground pork, chopped long beans, cucumbers, mint leaves, and bean sprouts.

Another idiosyncratic dish is samloh kako ($7), referred to on the menu as Cambodian ratatouille. The designation is a bit misleading, as the dish is more of a savory stew. It too possesses a pale, somewhat unappetizing, green-gray color thanks to the prahok. The flavor, however, does not disappoint. The dish is traditionally made with fish, but on Tola’s suggestion, I ordered it with pork rib on the bone. The stew contains bits of pumpkin, eggplant, and leafy herbs. Like the num banh chuk, it is not spicy, allowing you to take in and appreciate the depth of its flavors.

To oversimplify, Cambodian food is rustic compared to Thai food. The preparation is elegant but basic. Take the fried tilapia ($6), skin-on, deep-fried cross sections of fish tossed with onions sliced longitudinally with small slabs of ginger and whole, fermented beans. Served with plain rice, the dish is slightly sweet, mostly salty, and funky in the best possible way. You can imagine it cooked at home. That is the overall effect of the Queen’s Deli. It feels like a home kitchen, somewhere far away.

So much of White Center feels that way, a world apart from the city most of us know. With the streets now shiny and less threatening, the mainstream is finding its way here too. The Dubsea coffee shop in the Greenbridge development is a bright, airy hangout as sleek and cool as any in Capitol Hill. It serves Stumptown coffee beans, and baked goods from Macrina and Le Fournil. Full Tilt serves its gourmet ice cream here — it operates two other stores in Columbia City and the University District.

The beauty of White Center is that it contains, in equal parts, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Starting in June, the Kruys are proud to report, the Queen’s Deli will start serving Cambodian hot pot, which the owners found difficult to describe, saying only that it is not like any other kind of hot pot you have eaten, a claim I would bet on with confidence.

If you go: Queen’s Deli, 9808 14th Ave. S.W., Seattle, 206-767-8363. Open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

A former national reporter for Newsday and The Associated Press, journalist and author Hugo Kugiya writes about the Northwest for several publications, including his former employer, The Seattle Times. He has covered sports, crime, transportation, legal affairs, and music. His book 58 Degrees North was a finalist for the 2006 Washington State Book Award. You can reach him at hkugiya@yahoo.com.

Cambodia's time to shine

May 4, 2010
SOURCE: Epicure

This spicy cuisine is stepping up for a turn in the spotlight, writes David Sutherland.

CHAN Uoy is excited. The part-owner and food director of Melbourne's only Cambodian restaurant, Bopha Devi (which is at two locations: Docklands and Yarraville), is rapt that a Cambodian cookbook, From Spiders to Water Lilies, has been released in Australia. Not just because it supports a great cause - homeless children in Cambodia - but also because it finally puts Cambodian food in the spotlight.

''In terms of tourism, Cambodia is only just now starting to emerge from its black hole, so our cuisine has not become as familiar to people as, say, Thai or Vietnamese,'' he says. ''People have for too long associated Cambodia with Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. It's about time our great food got some exposure.''

Cambodian food has some similarities to the cuisine of neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam. It also has some marked differences.

Advertisement: Story continues belowThe most obvious is prahok, Cambodia's fermented salted fish, which grew from Cambodia's heavy historical reliance on its massive lake, Tonle Sap (meaning ''Great Lake''), and the Mekong River for freshwater fish.

''In the days of the Khmer empire, people salted and fermented the fish to preserve it,'' Uoy says. ''Over the centuries, prahok has contributed to the flavour of all sorts of Cambodian dishes.''

Prahok is used in everything from soups and salads to curries and stir-fries, and its distinctive salty-pungent flavour provides Cambodian cuisine with its most distinctive element.

''You could say it's an acquired taste,'' Uoy says. ''You either appreciate it or you don't. But when it's used correctly and in the right proportions, it can really enhance a dish.''

Prahok appears in various recipes in From Spiders to Water Lilies, which was produced by Friends International, a Cambodian-based charity dedicated to protecting vulnerable children. Apart from the other work the charity does to save children from poverty, slavery and abuse, Friends International also has a restaurant in the capital, Phnom Penh, where it teaches former street children how to cook, wait tables and run a business.

The restaurant - named Romdeng, meaning ''friends'' in Khmer - has become hugely popular, both with locals and tourists. It was the restaurant's head chef, Gutav Auer, who assembled the recipes for the book from his own collection and that of the restaurant team.

Uoy says the recipes that are featured in From Spiders to Water Lilies are ''quintessential dishes that encapsulate the essence of Cambodia''.

From Spiders to Water Lilies ($45) is available at cambodiancooking.com.au or from Bopha Devi Docklands and Yarraville.

"... the best stuff at Sophy’s Thai and Cambodian is Khmer all the way."

Sophy Khut brings Cambodia Town wherever she goes (Kimberly Valenzuela)

At Sophy's Thai and Cambodian, Choose the Latter

Sure, you could order the pad Thai, but why would you?

Thursday, Mar 4 2010
By EDWIN GOEI
OC Metro (Orange County, California, USA)

Long Beach’s Anaheim Street is to Cambodians what OC’s Bolsa Avenue is to Vietnamese. And for close to eight years, one of the most successful and beloved restaurants there was Sophy’s Thai and Cambodian. But in late 2008—a year after the largest community of Khmers outside Southeast Asia finally got city officials to designate them as the country’s first Cambodia Town—Sophy’s was forced to move out. Its landlord refused to renew the lease.

But luck and pluck have always characterized owner Sophy Khut and her crew. About the same time they were serving the last meal at the original location, she’d already gotten a new place ready to pick up where the old one had left off. Yes, it was seven blocks removed from her old hood, but in this building, recently vacated by a Chinese buffet, there would be four times the space. More important, it had its own parking lot. There would be no more tow-truck threats for those who couldn’t snag one of four designated spots at the old locale.

Of course, that doesn’t mean parking is now plentiful. The new lot is usually packed on weekend nights with the cars of the regulars who followed Sophy’s from Anaheim Street, as well as some newcomers.

This location is more accessible for those who might have been intimidated by the depths of Anaheim Street. Also there’s the “Thai” part in the restaurant’s name; it serves as a jumping-off point, simultaneously a license to explore and also insurance that should things get too weird and exotic, you can always order pad Thai.

It’s not much of a stretch. Thailand does share a border with Cambodia, and the cuisines naturally have some commonalities. But make no mistake: Sophy’s roots are Khmer. It is arguably more faithful to its food culture than other Cambodia Town restaurants, which mostly mix in Chinese dishes for the purpose of hosting wedding banquets.

I would be lying, however, if I didn’t say I used its Thai designation to sell it to friends who wouldn’t have otherwise schlepped to Long Beach for a cuisine they knew nothing about. Only when we arrived did I add, “Oh, yeah, it’s Thai and Cambodian.”

My plan was to ease them into the Khmer dishes so gradually that by the second trip, I would get them to try the wince-inducing sadao plant, a quintessentially, notoriously Khmer ingredient.

But that first night, I threw them softballs. We started with the minced chicken larb, a faithful rendition of the Thai dish you already know, perky from lime juice and fenced in by raw cabbage wedges. Next, there was an eggplant, ground pork and pepper stir-fry that married its purple, brown and red colors as well as it did its flavors. Banh cheo—a turmeric-yellow crepe made from beaten egg folded over sautéed bean sprouts—impressed, but only if you haven’t had the crispier Vietnamese version at Brodard in Garden Grove.

On the second trip, I convinced them it was the crabmeat-flecked chan pu they wanted, not the pad Thai. The first strand of noodle we slurped zapped our tongues with electricity. The dish is very pale yet very hot—kind of like Anne Hathaway.

By the time they tore up Sophy’s Cambodian beef jerky into ragged strips, they’d forgotten all about the Thai. These peppery, crispy, deep-fried logs of meat—twisty and thick enough to rig a sailboat—have always been one of Sophy’s most popular dishes. The Chinese broccoli with crispy pork should also be a big seller, if it’s not already. The trick, though, is to eat all the fried-to-crunchy pork-belly pieces immediately; wait too long, and their soak in the gravy turns them into inedible leather.

It was a soup called somlaw machu kreoung that finally sold my tablemates on Khmer food. “This is better than tom kha gai,” one proclaimed, his mouth crammed with a heaping spoonful of its tender beef, Chinese watercress and tiny Thai eggplants. And it certainly is—at the very least, it’s more complex. This is the differential calculus to tom kha gai’s algebra. Most of its depth is due to the spice paste from which it takes its name. Kreoung is the distinctly Khmer formula consisting mainly of ground lemongrass, galangal and turmeric. The latter gives the liquid its yellow, curry-like hue, while the rest contributes to its lemony zest. Every sip is almost too intense by half and as nourishing as the Tonlé Sap.

And when we finally arrived at the sadao plant—which was meant to offset the bottom-dwelling muddiness of the baked catfish—they were already game. Without added encouragement, one plucked a small bud and placed it in his mouth. Almost instantly, his face imploded into a pucker. The plant looked as demure as baby’s breath, but it packed a knee-buckling quinine astringency that he said, “tasted like evil.”

“That’s okay,” I said with a chuckle. “I still can’t quite palate that stuff myself.”

Sophy’s Thai and Cambodian, 3240 E. Pacific Coast Hwy., Long Beach, (562) 494-1763. Open daily, 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Entrées, $7.95-$13.95. Beer and wine.

This review appeared in print as "Choice Sophy’s: Sure, you could go the safe route and order the pad Thai, but the best stuff at Sophy’s Thai and Cambodian is Khmer all the way."

Restaurant review: Golden Villa in Long Beach

Photo: Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times

A new Cambodian restaurant combines traditional cooking with improvisation.

August 13, 2008
By Linda Burum, Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times (California, USA)

THE DISH of silky slices of lime-cured salmon looks like a platter of crudo, the trendy Italian-style raw fish. But the flavors are pure Cambodian -- Asian fish sauce punctuated by the sharp citrus jolt of shredded kaffir lime leaf, perfumed with a wild assortment of fresh leafy herbs.

You'd never know it from the scarcity of Cambodian restaurants, but L.A. is home to the largest expatriate community outside Cambodia. Still, Cambodian cuisine and restaurants serving it remain largely undiscovered.

But Kansas transplant Kaylene Men hopes to change that at her new restaurant, Golden Villa, in the Cambodia Town district of Long Beach.

She loves to show off the restaurant's salmon salad. Men is convinced that dishes such as this one -- with their proximity to the flavors of Thai and Vietnamese food -- will be an ambassador for the cuisine of her native country.

One reason we've seen so few such spots is the absence of a restaurant ownership tradition among Cambodians. Here and in the homeland, most restaurants are Chinese-owned. They double as banquet halls for weddings and other festivities. Not only are they often closed to the general public on weekends, but their Cambodian dishes, scattered throughout the largely Chinese menus, are also frustratingly unidentified in English.

Evolving dishes

BUT AFTER almost three decades of radical cultural adjustments among Cambodian Americans, we are starting to see a few welcome changes among the neighborhood's restaurants. At the moment, Golden Villa's plan is the most ambitious.

The restaurant's evolving direction is the handiwork of Men and her partner, Sophy Khut, longtime proprietor of the well-loved Sophy's Cambodian and Thai restaurant nearby. They've hired chef Lim Kim, who for eight years ran her own pan-Asian restaurant, Park Café, in the Boston Visitor's Center. Kim's brilliant talent for improvising with Cambodian ingredients is evident in the collection of avant-garde and traditional salads she has developed.

Minty, floral and bitter nuances weave their way into her inventive plates. Her flavor combinations are carefully calibrated and balanced. A julienned green mango salad with crunchy deep-fried catfish chunks is accented with minuscule dried shrimp for crunch; raw-cured shrimp tossed with slivered red pepper, bean sprouts and water spinach (known in Chinese as ong choy) comes scattered with a mince of roasted peanuts.

A dish called beef and watercress salad (actually ong choy) exemplifies the bitter-sweet flavor combination that's a familiar mark of Cambodian cooking.

Classic tastes

MANY dishes are strictly traditional: duck foot salad or pork blood rice porridge with pickled beans. The classic prahok katih, a dish that shows Cambodian cuisine's close relation to northern Thai food, resembles a bowl of Texas chili until you taste the creamy coconut milk mingled with ground pork and spiked with salty fish paste. You dip the accompanying raw vegetables in it. Similarly served is trei ang, a whole broiled fish accompanied by lightly pickled vegetables and a platter of varied raw vegetables that includes the quinine-bitter sadao flowers. You pick up a chunk of fish with a few herbs and vegetables, and then dip the bundle into an accompanying tart-sweet tamarind sauce before popping the packet into your mouth.

Men recommends her favorite, karko, a soupy stew loaded with a garden's harvest of fresh vegetables, including Asian pumpkin and two types of eggplant in a choice of vegetarian, fish or chicken versions. It's amped up with shreds of kaffir lime leaf and thickened with roasted rice powder, "a wonderful winter dish," she says. The small side plate of tiny, lethally hot pepper slices are there to add a spicy kick to your bowlful.

Of the many curries and stir-fried dishes, the juicy and entrancingly seasoned cubed beef lok lak, mounded over a bed of herb-spiked lettuces, is the least foreign for American tastes.

The restaurant, across from a branch of the Long Beach Public Library, is on the second story of a mini-mall. Previously the Angkor Supper Club and then a Thai restaurant, it's in a huge space. Mercifully, it's divided into two rooms, one for entertainment and parties and another with a warm polished wood bar that's more intimate.

If you love Thai and Vietnamese food, Golden Villa's kitchen will happily move your palate to the next frontier in Southeast Asian eating -- any day of the week.

food@latimes.com

Golden Villa

Location: 1360 E. Anaheim St., No. 205 (second floor), Long Beach, (562) 591-7331.

Price: Appetizers, $4.95 to $7.95; noodle dishes, $5 to $7; family-size soups, stir-fries and curries, $6 to $9; chef's specials and salads, $6 to $18.

Best dishes: Salmon, catfish or raw shrimp salads, prahok katih, beef lok lak, trei ang (fish with vegetables), kar-ko soup.

Details: Open Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. (closed Tuesday); Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Lot and street parking. Beer and wine. Visa and MasterCard accepted.

Phnom Penh serves authentic Cambodian food [-Home of the authentic "Phnom Penh" Machu soup]

Saroeun Trou, owner of Phnom Penh restaurant, shows off a bowl of Phnom Penh machu soup, a citrusy, tamarind-flavored broth filled with catfish and vegetables.

Wed, Jun. 11, 2008
By LAUREN CHAPIN
The Kansas City Star (Missouri, USA)

Like all Cambodians of a certain age, Saroeun Trou has stories to tell of the horror the Khmer Rouge inflicted on his country.

But Trou and his mother, Tuoch Keo, were among the lucky few who survived the slaughter that was later chronicled in “The Killing Fields.”

They escaped Cambodia and lived in refugee camps along the Thai border from 1979 to 1981. While in the camp, Trou worked for the American Embassy. In 1982 the two of them made their way to Kansas City. He has not been back since, although his mother has made a few trips home. Instead, he’s paying homage to his country through food.

In March Trou opened Phnom Penh Restaurant. He’d owned a Chinese restaurant years ago but had never included food from his homeland on the menu.

And I’d never had Cambodian food. It reminded me a little bit of Thai and Vietnamese food, although it was lighter than Thai and not as spicy as Vietnamese.

An exception was the Phnom Penh beefsticks, chewy, bite-size nuggets of beef threaded on a stick and served as an appetizer. Lacquered with a sweet, earthy sauce, the beefsticks were served with a shredded green papaya salad dressed in a bitingly spicy dressing.

Two of us shared three entrees, not knowing just how generous the portions were. The cha kreung was a mess of beef slices, green peppers and yellow onion slices spooned over white rice. The mee ka-thaing reminded me of pad Thai, without the fish sauce aroma and lime juice bite of the Thai dishes. The wide rice noodles were tossed with chopped Chinese broccoli, eggs and beef.

The favorite was the Phnom Penh machu, a tamarind-based brothy soup seasoned with crispy garlic pieces and loaded with pan-fried catfish hunks, lotus root slices, tomatoes, pineapple, Thai basil and chunks of some sort of Asian gourd. The tamarind gave the broth a snappy citrus taste. The lotus root, threaded with tiny holes, looked like pasta and had a vegetal crunch. The gourd pieces, which looked like cucumber, were slithery but al dente, while the pineapple gave the soup a tropical sweetness. It was fabulous.

Trou has two Cambodian desserts: sarai, a Cambodian-style gelatin made with coconut milk and loaded with jackfruit and longan, and loat, a dessert soup made with cooked tapioca flour bits stirred into a sweet cane sugar and coconut milk syrup.

A couple of things to keep in mind: Trou was waiting on the credit card machine to arrive, so take cash. And service can be slow; dishes are prepared to order. Although he does much of the cooking, two of his children, Julie and Jimmy, help out.

Phnom Penh Restaurant: 3537 Independence Ave. 816-231-1700. Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
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Menu sampler

Phnom Penh machu: $8.95
Phnom Penh beefsticks: 5.95
Cha kreung: $6.95

Cambodian family finds home in Restaurant Row

Sovan Boun Thuy, left, of Chez Sovan Express in Restaurant Row, helps guide a customer to the drinks. With her are daughters Kelly Nou, middle, and Laura Chum. (CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM)
Sovan Boun Thuy, of Chez Sovan Express in Restaurant Row, cooks in the kitchen. "I was not sure people in the United States would like my food," she recalled before opening her first restaurant in 1987. (CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM)
Thuy, middle, with daughters Kelly Nou, left, and Laura Chum. (CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM)

Noodle soups and amok curries are the staple dishes at the popular Chez Sovan Express

STORY SUMMARY

Sovan Boun Thuy has always loved feeding people.

That's been good news for hungry people in California in the 21 years since she opened her first restaurant in San Jose.

For the past four years, she and her family also have filled the stomachs of Honolulu's lunch crowd with signature dishes such as amok curry and noodle soup.

Cooking is a self-taught talent that Thuy, 66, has perfected at the three restaurants she started after arriving in Long Beach, Calif., from Thailand in 1975 with little money and five children. Thuy's youngest child, Laura Chum, 30, and Chum's husband, Edison Beltran, now help her run the Restaurant Row location, while her second son manages her first restaurant in San Jose. All of Thuy's now-six children have worked at her eateries.

Her restaurants are something she wants to keep alive for years to come.

"I would like to help pass it down from generation to generation," she said.

CHEZ SOVAN EXPRESS
» Opened: 2004
» Menu: Serves Cambodian lunches, including curry chicken, noodle soups and amok
» Where: Restaurant Row, 500 Ala Moana Blvd.
» Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., weekdays
» Prices: Less than $10
» Phone: 599-8812

FULL STORY

By Jennifer Sudick
jsudick@starbulletin.com
Honolulu Star Bulletin (Hawaii, USA)

When Sovan Boun Thuy opened her first restaurant in a ramshackle area of San Jose, Calif., in 1987, she worried few Americans would eat the native Cambodian fare she had cooked all her life.

So she grilled hamburgers.

"I was not sure people in the United States would like my food," she said.

She was partly right -- the tiny corner restaurant drew only a few dozen people each day -- "mostly bums, the homeless" she said. "I came here bare-handed, right? So I looked for a cheap (location)."

That changed when a friend from the San Jose Mercury News newspaper, where Thuy helped translate Cambodian interviews for reporters, begged her to cook what she knew best. Those noodle soups and amok curries are now the staple dishes served at her newest location, Chez Sovan Express, at Restaurant Row.

The restaurant, opened by Thuy's eldest daughter Kelly Nou, celebrates its fourth anniversary this winter. Not much has changed from the initial recipes perfected two decades ago in California -- lunch items range from the popular curry chicken to stir-fried vermicelli noodles and cost less than $10.

"I see people eat good and I'm happy," Thuy said. "I like to feed people. It has always been that way, since I was born, I think."

Thuy, 66, runs the restaurant now with her youngest daughter Laura Chum, 30, and Chum's husband, Edison Beltran. She spends seven days a week prepping, preparing and shopping for food. Maintaining the restaurant, which costs more than $7,000 a month in rent and utilities, is expensive and time-consuming, she said.

"We try to tell her to relax a little bit," Chum said. "She enjoys her work so much."

Chum has worked in Sovan's eateries since she was a teenager, first in the original restaurant her brother still owns on Oakland Avenue in San Jose and then in Sovan's second -- and much bigger -- location in the city's Campbell neighborhood that Thuy opened in 1990 and sold to a friend upon moving to Hawaii in 2005. All of Thuy's six children have worked in her restaurants, as well as her now-retired husband, Ytthan Chum, 68, who once served in the Cambodian air force.

"We can fight and bicker all we want, and I can't get fired," Laura Chum said. "It's nice. It's family. We kind of work on our own pace at our own time. It's a little different."

Thuy evacuated her then-five children, ranging in age from 1 1/2 to 11 years old, to Long Beach, Calif., in 1975 after the communist Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot took over Thailand, where she had been living with her husband for five years. A member of the Cambodian army, he was killed when he returned to Cambodia that year for work.

"My house, my farm over there -- they took it," she said. "I cannot take it back. It's OK because we ran away from home."

After a year, Phnom Penh, Cambodia-born Thuy moved her family to Washington, D.C., where she met her second husband and had Laura, followed by a move to Portland, Ore., and then San Jose.

Thuy said she owes much of her success to a restaurant review published a few months after she opened her first restaurant.

"I cried that day. I cried," she said. "People were 15 tables full and outside was a long line. I had only one son help in the front of this small place and one cook inside, that's it."

Business has remained strong, drawing praise from foodie bloggers throughout the Bay Area.

"It was very successful," she said. "And then too many people were looking for my food, so I eliminated the hamburger."

The answer to Cambodian cravings

SUVARNABHUMI KIRI

October 4, 2007
By Denise Taylor,
Boston Globe Correspondent (Boston, Mass., USA)

Let the lovers of that stinky, gray, gloppy fish paste called prahok rejoice. Boston (well, Allston) has a new Cambodian restaurant, and it's not afraid to use this odorous but tasty Cambodian foodstuff that all adventurous eaters should try.

But those looking for more familiar flavors need not shy away, Suvarnabhumi Kiri also offers an epic selection of sushi and Thai in a pretty space with a reasonable beer, wine, and sake list. It's enough to make my heart race.

Until now, if you craved inexpensive, authentic Cambodian cooking (and you should), you had to make the trek to Lowell, Lynn, or Revere. There you'll find scruffy little storefronts that cook the best local versions of this fabulously herby, bright, flavorful cuisine.

Those mom-and-pop joints are worth the trip, but they keep odd hours and don't serve alcohol. So the prospect of cutting the commute, eating after dark, and washing down a yummy plate of caramelized beef loc lac with a nice, cool Singha Light, well, that's a good thing.

When we settled into the spacious dining room dotted with dark, glossy tables, we flipped past the Thai and sushi pages and headed to the back of the menu. There we found about two dozen Cambodian choices, and it turns out there's more to come: Later this month, the Khmer section of the menu is going to grow.

We went straight for the prahok. Like the addictive fish sauce used in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine, only more intense, this fermented fish is used as a seasoning in Cambodia. Think of it as going from a standard brie cheese to a superbly stinky Camembert de Normandie.

The paste was in its full glory in the prahok katee ($12.95), adding a rich, salty undertone to this spicy dip of ground pork, creamy coconut milk, tasty Thai basil, and one of the world's greatest seasonings: intensely aromatic Kaffir lime leaves. The dip was ringed by crisp, fresh vegetables, and we couldn't stop dipping. It's an entrée, but it's more fun as a shared appetizer.

Three soups proved the Khmer cooks in the kitchen (who work alongside the Thai cooks) really know how to brew and stew. Cambodian chicken soup (s'nao namgnou, $4.25) looked like a simple broth flecked with scallion and lime leaf, but one sip revealed a seemingly endless roll call of flavors. The cook seasons this soup by the cup, smashing and swishing lemongrass, cilantro-like sawtooth herb, Asian mint, and more in the broth before scooping it all out.

A delicate sweet and sour stew (somlar machu youn, best with shrimp, $10.95) - swimming with crunchy lotus root, soft chunks of papaya, and toasty fried garlic - also had a complex, addictive broth. A thick garden stew (samlor kako, $12.95) with chicken was a tasty tangle of spinach, beans, Asian pumpkin, and squash in a dusky, prahok-tweaked brew.

Other Khmer classics, such as juicy beef loc lac, which you douse with a thimble of tangy lime-pepper sauce ($11.95), and a light, homemade, green curry (samlor katee, $12.95) tossed over super-fresh vegetables, were just as satisfying.

Meanwhile, a brief sampling of the Thai and sushi menus turned up some very good Thai and some gorgeous but average-tasting sushi that we expect will improve under the guidance of co-owner Nathan Chhour, who spent 10 years as a sushi chef at Jae's Café.

But it's the Cambodian flavors that got us most excited, because life's simply too short for yet another plate of pad Thai.

The world in a box [- Angkor Wat was built by Indian merchants???]

From the Cambodian who lost his family to Pol Pot, to the Chinese woman who thought the Shetland Isles would be covered in skyscrapers: Guardian writers interview the people behind the nation's takeaways

Saturday April 7, 2007
The Guardian (UK)



Steven: My grandfather is from China. He went to Vietnam and crossed over to Cambodia. I was born in Phnom Penh in 1957. I was there when the Americans were carpet-bombing in the early 70s. At night, we'd hear the noise of the bombing far outside the city. I remember the last few occasions it was very close and the whole house was shaking. That's when my father decided some of us had to go. I was sent away to school in Thailand.

My parents stayed through the time of Pol Pot. Since I left, I've lost them both. We had no contact, nothing. I know that my father passed away - how, I don't know. A friend of mine from Cambodia, his auntie in Hong Kong, knows exactly what happened to my father. I keep saying one of these days I need to make a trip to Hong Kong to see her. I want to know, but it's hard for me ... Sometimes I feel guilt because of what he went through and I didn't.

My wife Lin was born in Phnom Penh, though her family is from China, too. We grew up together - the two families were neighbours. Years later, when I was working in England, I heard from a relative that there was a family in Cambodia asking about me. I knew immediately that it was them. I decided to find them. That was 1994 - I hadn't been back for 14 years. I found Lin, her mother and her sister. We married in 1995. I didn't expect that, it just happened that way.

Did you see The Killing Fields? It cannot show everything - it was much worse than that. Lin's family died of sickness and starvation, one by one - eight of them in the family, three of them left. My family was 10, and so far as I know there's only me, my sister in Australia and my brother in Japan left.

After 1975 it was really bad. Everybody was sent out of the city by the Khmer Rouge into the forests to get the land growing. If you refused to go, you would be gunned down on the spot. Some got killed just because they were educated. Anybody who spoke a foreign language had to be killed.

For me, life has just been a matter of change, going from place to place. My wife has been through so much more. She nearly got killed once just for stealing some potatoes; everybody had to do that - if you didn't, you would more than likely die of hunger. You worked from five o'clock until about three or four in the afternoon, and then they gave you one spoonful of rice with a lot of water in it.

It was like that all the time up to 1979. Things got a bit better when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia.

Lin: I think two months longer and I would have died, too. My hand was injured from a poisonous thorn. I couldn't walk, I was too weak. The Vietnamese came and they sent me to hospital. That's why I'm alive.

Steven: The main thing about being in this country is that you are free and at peace. You can do anything. You make a little money, you enjoy yourself, nobody bothers you.

We have three children: Jenny is 10, David is eight and James is five. Jenny and David are both musical. They started violin nearly two years ago and this autumn they are taking their grade five.

Lin: My mother came by herself to Cambodia from China during the second world war. She was seven. She survived, she lived through everything that has happened in Cambodia, and now she is here with us in Oxford. She is very strong.

Steven: Physically strong and mentally strong. She likes the summer here. She loves flowers - she's never seen so many flowers. She's a good cook, too.

I like cooking. My father was a chef in Cambodia - he cooked for weddings and receptions for friends and neighbours. My training was as a cobbler, but when I came over here in 1980, shoe factories were closing down; it was the wrong moment to be a shoe-maker. That's why I ended up cooking - first at a French restaurant in Covent Garden. I seemed to pick it up quite quickly, and then, when you see people enjoying their food, it becomes a passion.

I'd love to turn this place into a restaurant. A lot of my customers are students - a group of them like to come out and have a meal. In Cambodian cooking, you use lemon grass. Also coriander, galangal, turmeric. Quite a bit of the cooking probably came over from India. There have always been a lot of Indians in Cambodia. They come to trade.

Angkor Wat was built by an Indian merchant more than 1,000 years ago. Somebody from the East Oxford Action group painted a mural of Angkor Wat on the side of our building because before that people kept spraying graffiti. They don't any more. The name AK City is short for Angkor.

Cambodian [Restaurant]
Steven and Lin Chung, AK City, 94 Cowley Road, Oxford, 01865 243028
Signature dish: Chilli and sweet basil, stir-fried with chicken, £4.15