There are only a handful of Cambodian restaurants in the greater Seattle area. It’s perplexing. Why was Cambodian cuisine left behind as America fell in love with Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese food in the 80s and 90s?
I brought this question to Diane Le, one of three sisters who own Phnom Penh Noodle house in the Chinatown-International District of Seattle. Their father, Sam Ung, immigrated to Seattle from Cambodia in 1980, and started the restaurant in 1987.
What I learned is that there’s one period which changed the trajectory of their family restaurant, Cambodian food in the United States, and the country’s cuisine as a whole: The Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-1979. During those horrific four years and the equally chaotic aftermath, a quarter of Cambodia’s population was killed or starved to death.
In this interview Diane discusses the regime’s effect on the cuisine, as well as the flavors and traditions which define Cambodian cuisine today. The words “Cambodian” and “Khmer” are used throughout the interview. “Cambodian” refers to the nationality, whereas “Khmer” refers to the major ethnic group and language.
Why do you think Cambodian food has flown under the radar in the US?
In general Cambodian food’s been overshadowed by the mainstream Southeast Asian cuisines like Thai and Vietnamese food.
A big wave of Cambodian refugees immigrated to the States after the Khmer Rouge in the 80s and 90s. But during the Khmer Rouge a lot of the smarter business owners and teachers were the ones that were killed off because they were seen as a threat to the new regime. And when the Khmer Rouge fell, there were five years of starvation and malnutrition in the refugee camps – nobody was practicing Khmer cooking and learning how to run a business. When they got to the United States it was really hard to acclimate to the culture, become a business owner, and relearn their old recipes. So not a lot of people started Cambodian restaurants.
For Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants at that time, there was way more support and an established community. The Chinese especially came here way before the Cambodians. My dad chose to start the restaurant here in the Chinatown-International District, but there wasn’t an established network to support the Cambodian community. Hence you had more Chinese and more Vietnamese restaurants starting up and becoming popular.
It’s nice that there’s more interest in it now. I think having Angkor Wat in Cambodia as a tourist attraction helped put it on the map. And when Tomb Raider came out, people started to ask “where’s Cambodia?” and “what’s the cuisine like?”.
What do you think makes Cambodian food unique?
Like a lot of cuisines it’s a melting pot of history, colonization, and influences from so many different other countries.
Compared with Thai or Vietnamese, there isn’t a ton that’s unique about the cooking process itself. There are lots of stews, uncooked dishes like fresh rolls, cooking in the wok, pots of broth, use of the pestle and mortar. A lot of those techniques are shared across the regions.
But the geographical makeup of Cambodia has a lot of rivers. These are where everyone settled, cultivated rice and began to fish. So fish and rice are staples in Cambodia.
They do everything you can with fish: Dried fish, salted fish, fish soups. But it’s always salty. Especially during the Khmer Rouge and other difficult times, it was all about making food stretch longer. So if it was really salty then everyone just needed a little bit of fish, and then a lot of rice, so that there would be enough to go around. And I think that those strong flavors just kind of stuck. There’s lots of salty fish, salty pickled fruit – we always sprinkle apples and fruits with salt and red pepper flakes or fish sauce. It’s all very heavy on the salt.
I remember my grandma making jerky too, just drying it out in the backyard. And lots of pickled things: jars of preserved lemons, mustard greens and bean sprouts. Stuff that’s made to last and made to go far.
Eating worms and bugs came from the harder times as well. When there’s no food, you just find alternative food. Tarantulas, worms, grasshoppers, spiders and ants are all normal street food now.
There are many influences from other countries. Use of turmeric came from India. Baguettes came from the French coming in. Coconut and chili were brought by the Thai. I think about our own menu, where one of the popular dishes is Mee Katang, stir-fried wide rice noodles. The name Mee Katang literally means Cantonese noodles. So the idea of stir-frying noodles was brought down by the Chinese, but then we just tweaked it a bit with gravy, garlic, and other touches.
What do daily meals look like in Battambang, where your family is from?
For the most part growing up we just vacationed in the United States, and it wasn’t until our late teens when my dad took us back to Cambodia.
In the mornings, breakfast would be at a noodle shop. The restaurants have concrete floors, plastic chairs and tables. The server comes around and brings you your noodles. And everyone knows everyone there, so they’re just chatting away. There’s no breakfast-specific food. People eat the same dishes all day long.
Dinners in the evenings would be at home. And like most Asian cooking, we’d have to have a soup, a stir fry, a seafood, a vegetable. Like a ton of food all the time. And it’s not just a one entree per person type of thing. It’s very interactive.
It’s crazy. That’s why I don’t cook. I’m like how do you cook all of these different dishes every day? It’s nuts!
For someone who’s never tried Cambodian food, what dishes would you recommend?
Our menu is a great entry into Cambodian food. It’s easy on the palette because there are flavors that most will be already familiar with if they’ve had Thai, Chinese, or Vietnamese food.
One of the most popular ones on our menu is the Phnom Penh noodle soup, known in Khmer as Kuy Teav. Small rice noodles go in a broth made with pork and squid, and topped with sliced pork, ground pork, and seafood. It’s a nice hearty bowl of noodles.
I already mentioned Mee Katang, the stir fried noodle dish. The flavors of garlic, oyster sauce, fish sauce, and soy sauce are familiar for people.
A-Mok Trei is a delicious red fish curry with lemongrass, coconut milk, and chili peppers.
Once you’ve tried some of those entry-level dishes, there are some that get a little more more adventurous. You could go for the deep fried fish cake, Prahut Jien, which also has a version in Thai cuisine.
And then there’s Prahok Ktiss which is ground pork with salty fish in a red coconut sauce. It’s a little salty, a little spicy, and has lots of fresh vegetables – you just dip them and eat it with rice. Any time you try that salty fermented fish (Prahok), you’re moving further along the spectrum of Khmer food.
What’s your favorite Cambodian dish and why?
When I eat at our restaurant I always like to bring others because I like to have a few different things. So it’s hard to pick just one.
I’d say Battambang’s Favorite Noodle is my favorite. It’s something that’s very unique to the area. Rice noodles are mixed with an herb soy sauce and roasted garlic. Then there is steamed bean sprout and it’s all topped with ground peanut, pickled radish, ground shrimp, hard boiled egg, and pickled cucumbers. And then you put a little bit of our hot sauce on there and mash it all together.
What’s funny is that the name is a little misleading. In Khmer it’s called Mee Kola, and Kola is a Northeastern minority ethnic group. They came down from China and created this dish and, and as time goes on they’ve tweaked it a bit. Battambang is in the Northwest, but it’s one of the noodle dishes they eat the most. So even though it’s called Mee Kola and not really from Battambang, we named it that for our restaurant because they love it so much there.
It’s a dish you wouldn’t find in Thailand and I haven’t found it entirely in Vietnamese cuisine either. So I feel like it’s a good one that is really Khmer. If you have it with bone soup, made at our restaurant with pork neck bone simmered in broth, it’s a perfect Cambodian meal.
Have there been any challenges educating customers about Cambodian cuisine?
I think about the interactions I have with new customers, and a lot of them are going on a trip to Cambodia or at least have heard of it. And most of them have been exposed to Vietnamese and Thai food.
So it’s easy to describe if you’ve had those foods, because it’s similar but maybe the fish sauce is a little more pronounced, or it’s a little saltier, or it’s not as spicy. That makes a lot of our dishes easier to get into.
So if you just come in and try it you’re bound to find something you like. You just have to be open to it.
To experience some of the dishes that are important to Cambodian cuisine and hear the stories behind them, visit Diane and her sisters at Phnom Penh Noodle House in the Chinatown-International District in Seattle. I also really recommend reading “I survived the Killing Fields” by their father, Sam Ung. It gives a harrowing first-hand testimony of the period which changed the trajectory of the country.
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