Will Cambodian food ever catch on in America?

Thai restaurants are a dime a dozen, but 30 years after Pol Pot, Khmer cuisine is still hard to find in the U.S. Why hasn't it become the next big thing? Plus: A recipe to try at home

By Matthew Fishbane

Read more: Cambodia, Asia, Immigration, Recipes, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

June 26, 2007 | You wouldn't know it from looking at me -- perched upon a wooden stool window-side in the Kampuchea Noodle Bar, on a trendy street in Manhattan's Lower East Side -- but I'm eating my way to the past. I'm hunched over a bowl of something named Phnom Penh katiev, and the long white strands of rice noodle are dripping off my chopsticks back into a cloudy broth. Let it splatter. I'm fishing for the shrimp, lapping them up and wondering if the tingling on my tongue is a hint of MSG.

This is New York, food capital of the world, where you should be able to get whatever you want, whenever you want. But I'm just not finding it. Kuy thiew (koy-TEA-oo), not "katiev," is breakfast in Cambodia. I came here hoping to be transported back to the corner of Street 130 and Preah Ang Eng Boulevard, downstairs from my river-view apartment in Phnom Penh. There, under the rotating fans at Rthy's sidewalk noodle stand, bright pink plastic chairs are arranged around bright blue plastic tables, each with a can of metal spoons and plastic chopsticks in the center. The clovers of sauces are so dark red and corrosive and oily that not even the 90-degree heat can spoil them.

In New York, transplanted Hong Kong hands have a couple of Chinatowns to choose from. Colombians can head out to Queens for an oblea caramel wafer and yucca bread under the elevated train tracks. Eastern Europeans longing for a borscht can ride the F train to Brighton Beach. West Africans have the Bronx, North Africans have the East Village -- and even the Bukharians, the Sephardim of the Silk Road, can find home cooking out in Rego Park. But for Cambodians (and nostalgic travelers like me), a taste of home remains elusive.

Last year, such was my longing, I made the trip to Lowell, Mass., just to order a plate of pliah, marinated beef salad, and sit under posters of pop stars in silk dresses and whiteface. By the odd topology of refugee migration, a quarter of Lowell's 105,000 citizens are Cambodian. (One grocer told me he stocks his vegetable counter with the help of a Cambodian immigrant in Florida who found the Mekong Delta-like Everglades perfect for growing tropical greens.) "Is this how it's supposed to be?" my uninitiated companion asked about the pliah, gazing around the Formica-clad dining room with an expression approaching horror. "This is it," I said, chomping on a dangly piece of cold tripe. The acid from the Asian coriander bit through my teeth. "This is right."

Over the past three decades, the West has fallen in love with the cuisines of Thailand, southern China, Vietnam and Malaysia, even Burma (for its barbecue), but somehow, Cambodia's food has slipped through the cracks. It has been nearly 30 years since "before Pol Pot" became "after." Two million tourists converged on Cambodia last year to see the temples at Angkor and what's left of Phnom Penh's French colonial grace. A generation of refugees resettled in America and France and had children of their own. Slowly, Khmer cultural heritage is being restored, protected, re-created. A no-fly zone covers the temples at Angkor, to keep engine blasts from shaking delicate foundations. The nation's Royal Ballet has trained a new troupe of hyper-flexible ingenues to perform on world tours. And Khmer shadow puppetry, called sbaek thom, or "big skin," now carries UNESCO's seal as one of 89 "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity." Why not Khmer food?

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It's 2003: I'm living, teaching and writing in Phnom Penh, and for the first time in my life I'm employing someone to cook for me at home. Bophal Kattya, round-faced and still remarkably smooth-skinned at 62, sits cross-legged on the floor of my apartment, pounding out a kreung herb paste in the stone mortar. Around her, arrayed in a rough semicircle, all within arm's reach, lie the key ingredients: a bottle of Golden Boy brand fish sauce, limes, lemongrass, peeled shallots and garlic, long red chilies, a jar of sugar and a strainer of bright green herbs scooped by the fistful from a market stall down the street, including sweet basil, saw leaf and rice paddy herb. Bophal's teaching my girlfriend, a chef from Britain, how to make crispy noodle salad. We're learning that there is such a thing as Khmer cuisine, and that it is, like much of Cambodian culture, in danger of being lost.

Once -- before Cambodia fell apart under the Khmer Rouge -- Bophal was sent from the royal court to cook for the Khmer ambassador in France. It was a fitting position for what she called the "bourgeois upbringing" of the daughter of a government official. Bophal passed her time in France cooking potato curries with star anise and cinnamon, and then she returned home, cooking nothing but rice porridge for four years while her family and her country fell apart.

Now, in my apartment, with overhead fans whipping overheated air, Bophal teaches the British chef how to splay a duck, stuff it with ground pork and spices, and sew it back together. She shows us how to dry leftover cooked rice to be deep-fried into cakes, how to use toothpicks to fashion a bowl out of a banana leaf for steaming a fish mousse (called amok), and how a dribble of egg whites on top, just before the sliver of red chilies, helps bring out the green in the herbs. Khmer curries are not like Thai curries, Bophal explains; they're sweeter, smoother, more Java than India. She says that no one knows how to make the nyoam salad anymore because the matrons who served it in its "right proportions" all died in the war.

In her cooking, Bophal conjures up the Shangri-La of pre-Pol Pot Cambodia. She describes a quiet tropical corner of the world. Shade and space. A rich heritage and a functional religious and social order. Food for everyone. Ceremonial food, like heaping wedding platters of crispy noodle salad, with its colorful vegetable juliennes, both succulent and crunchy under vinegary-sweet dressing. Ingenious snack food, like the pork-stuffed ingots of rice wrapped in banana leaf for easy transport out to the fields. Ritual cakes for the saffron-clad monks. Upper-class foods like spicy fish sausage and peasant baw-baws, rice porridges garnished with zucchini flower and mudfish paste, thought to offer the restorative power of Chinese medicine.

When Bophal teaches us the history of Khmer food, she teaches us the history of Cambodia. The great kingdom of the part of the world we now call Southeast Asia was the seven-century reign of the Khmers at Angkor. Only a sophisticated grasp of rice cultivation, food preservation and irrigation, along with a refined cultural order, could have permitted the grand works of the line of god-kings who, at Angkor's zenith, presided over a city the size of New York.

Next page: Why can't I get a good bowl of kuy thiew in New York City?