by Edward Lee
He’s sixty-eight now, and I can hardly believe that the handsome man with the chiseled body in the photos is the same arthritic person sitting next to me on a barstool. But he talks like any man who has used his fists his whole life. His voice is a soft whisper with traces of menace, as if he might turn on me at any moment. When he wants to make a point, he pinches my shoulder just below the back of my neck, and I actually cringe. What time has taken away from his posture has remained in his enormous hands. His fingers retain the muscle memory of violence; his hand clamps with the force of a man decades younger. If not for his bum shoulder, he could still throw a hell of a punch.
The ice in my whiskey is melting fast, but I don’t mind. I hang on every word he says while his hand sits on my neck. Bono is blaring away on the jukebox, and the Red Sox game is on the TV. I light Jack’s cigarette, and as he exhales, the last sunlight of the afternoon coming in through the tinted window catches the plumes of smoke like a scene from an old black-and-white movie. I resist the urge to take his picture.
I didn’t come to Lowell just for the boxing stories or to write a wistful history of the city’s glorious past. I came here to have one of the best Cambodian dinners of my life. America has never glorified Cambodian food, and it is not likely it ever will. Flanked by Vietnam to the east and Thailand to the west, Cambodia (and its cuisine) has long been over-shadowed in Americans’ minds by these other, more dominant cultures. As Americans, we demand a good helping of Hollywood romance to wash down our ethnic cuisines. Yet for most of us, there is nothing romantic or cheerful about Cambodia. What little we know about it has mostly to do with the 1970s genocide and famine brought on there by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. A generation was murdered. The country was burned to the ground. It has yet to recover. Almost all the Cambodians in America today are refugees from that period. All of them still grieve. Sam and Denise are just two of them. They run the restaurant Simply Khmer in Lowell. I fell in love with them right away.
Here in Lowell, a city that has never been on anyone’s culinary radar, you can witness the melding of cultures through immigration. Cambodians now make up about 40 percent of the population of Lowell, which is about fifty thousand people. There are more Cambodian restaurants in Lowell than in all of New York City, and they are all really good. Some, such as Senmonorom, cater to a wider audience that wants a hybrid version of Chinese and Vietnamese food. But Sam, of Simply Khmer, stands alone in Lowell as a Cambodian chef whose dishes straddle three worlds, offering flavor combinations that reflect his experiences growing up in Cambodia, Thailand, and the northeastern United States.
Sam has a gleeful, boyish face despite being in his midfifties. “I am Khmer,” Sam says, “but my life in Cambodia was so fast, I was so young when I left, I feel like my time here in Lowell has really made me who I am as a chef.”
We talk briefly before he heads back into the kitchen for the busy dinner service. This is my third visit to his restaurant, and I sit with a notebook in hand. I have so many questions I want to ask him, so many details about his life I want to know before we even begin to talk about the food.
Most restaurants fall into one of two categories: either the identity of the person cooking your food is incidental or that person is a lauded chef whose narrative is known to you before you even peruse the menu. Places like Sam’s are unique because you get to unravel the chef’s story yourself, with each steaming bowl of soup that comes out of the kitchen. It is impossible to write about Sam’s food without knowing the narrative of his life. This is where I disagree with food critics whose mission is to judge only what is on the plate. The story such critics tell is about them, their preferences, their expectations, not the chef’s. What they write may be necessary and relevant to dining culture, but it disconnects the food from its origins, its narrative, its roots. The plate of food has never been the be-all and end-all for me. Quite the opposite: for me, good food is just the beginning of a trail that leads back to a person whose story is usually worth telling.
After Sam disappears into the kitchen, I sit with his wife, Denise. She is the outgoing one, with the kind of beauty that dares you to imagine what she looked like in her youth. Now in her late forties, she left Cambodia in 1983 and settled into a predominantly white American neighborhood in Wichita, Kansas, where she had a pretty typical American upbringing—until a marriage was arranged between her older sister and a Cambodian man who lived in Lowell. That meant the family would move as well. Denise was just sixteen at the time.
She is a grandmother now, but you would never guess. She speaks with a youthful smile and moves around the restaurant with the exuberance of someone a generation younger. She is easy to talk to and eager to explain things on the menu that I don’t know—names such as baw-baw, som-law, and pro-hok (which is also spelled praw-hok on the same menu, though apparently the two are the same thing; Denise tells me that the spelling varies depending on whom you ask).
Navigating a menu so unfamiliar is like trying to learn a new language in the time it takes for a waiter to bring you water. My eyes scan the menu looking for patterns, or any recognizable hint to help me decipher the language. Novices will order straight from the pictures, but I know enough to steer clear of that pitfall. I want the dishes that are unique, evocative. I didn’t drive all the way to Lowell for a spring roll; I don’t care how good they are. I want that one item on the menu that prompts the waiter, when I order it, to look incredulously at me and say, “You sure you want that?” Yes, that’s exactly what I want, that and the three other items that make you doubt me.
While Denise is guiding me through the menu, I tell her I want something really different. I don’t get what I’m asking for on the first go ’round. (I never do.) I have to politely decline the chicken wings and the spicy shrimp. (Yes, I’m sure everyone loves them, but I’m not everyone, and I want to get down to the nitty-gritty.) Denise suggests the obligatory sautéed beef and pork stir-fry that every Asian country makes in one form or another. Again, thanks but no thanks. Then I see an item on the menu that has a noticeably long name, the combination of consonants hard to pronounce. It stands by itself on the page, awkward and lonely: Som-law Ma-Ju Kroung Sach Ko. Why is it here? It doesn’t fit the patterns of the other dishes. It must be good if they bothered to list it. I point to it and study Denise’s reaction. She nods halfheartedly, but in a way that is trained, not emotional. It’s fishy, she says. I look down at the description written in English, a nonsequential list of ingredients, and I see “tripe.” Fishy and tripey? I want this. Smiling broadly, she asks, “You sure?” Double sure.
We also agree on smoked ground fish in mud fish sauce; cow intestines with tuk pro hok, a fermented fish paste; and amok trey, fish steamed in banana leaves with coconut milk, lemongrass, lime, and shallots. When the food arrives, I can tell just from the aroma that this is different. I have eaten in Cambodian restaurants before, in Houston and Los Angeles, but both times I left feeling as if I had eaten something more reminiscent of Vietnamese food. Before eating at Simply Khmer, I paced uneasily through my life with the opinion that either I didn’t really like Cambodian food or it wasn’t anything special. In my gut, I knew that neither was true, but I had nothing else to go on. Because the ingredients in Cambodian food are so similar to those of its neighboring countries, it’s difficult to detect a distinct, staunchly Cambodian identity. Coconut milk, lemongrass, ginger, basil, and chile are common threads throughout Southeast Asia, which makes it hard to say where Thai food ends and Cambodian food begins, but one noticeable difference is the pungent fermented fish paste at the heart of every delicious dish that comes out of Sam’s kitchen. He calls it pra-hak, and it is basically fermented fish and guts beaten into a paste with spices and roots until it becomes a magical elixir. It is pra-hak that gives Sam’s dishes structure and depth.
Ingredients such as coconut, ginger, and lemongrass have become so much a part of the American vernacular that we forget how exotic and aromatic the
y are. It is one thing to enjoy a lemongrass panna cotta. It is another thing entirely to be confronted with a fistful of lemongrass alongside a slew of other aggressive ingredients. Sam’s food makes me hungrier as I eat it. I move into an altered state of mind, the flavors and aromas floating through me at levels I’m not used to. Instead of being sated, I become addicted. Even the mud fish sauce (which at first is so overpowering that I have a mild gag reflex) becomes a dip I can’t stop putting my finger in. A lot of the reason is the salt: this is sodium-heavy food, and I crave it. The aromatics not only mask the salt but perfume it, so I mindlessly go back for more and more, until my blood pressure screams for me to stop. I sit there for a good forty-five minutes, and my spoon never hits the table. Denise drops by every few minutes to check on me, and each time, I have sauce dribbling down my chin.
When I finally stop eating, I’m exhausted. The world has gone quiet. As in those brief few minutes after sex, when all you hear is the sound of your lungs working, I sit there just breathing, without a single rational thought in my head. I look down at my notebook, and the page is blank. I have failed to make any notes. Fortunately, Denise is nice enough to go through each menu item again, listing the ingredients.
I will spare you the recipe for the intestines, but I do want you to try making amok trey. I’ve replaced the tilapia with catfish, but any firm-fleshed fish will work. I’ve also adjusted Sam’s recipe slightly for efficiency, but his ingredients are all there. (In case you’re wondering: Sam is open to sharing his recipes—except for his pra-hak, which of course is the one recipe I really want.)
At the end of the meal, I wait around for Sam to finish up in the kitchen. My belly is swollen with food, and at one point I actually nod off. When customers eventually thin out, Sam joins me at the table. He is a gentle human being, nervous, beguiling, and utterly polite. Now fifty-five, he arrived in Lowell in 1974, when he was twelve. Everything before that is a horrendous blur for him. He was raised on a farm in a small village near the Thai border. When the Khmer Rouge marched into his village, his life took a violent course, one from which it would never recover. The idyllic farm became a labor camp. One night, the men of his village were accused of plotting to escape across the border. The next day, soldiers arrived and took away almost every male, including Sam’s father. None of them were ever seen again. Sam thinks they were all murdered, but nobody knows for sure. He was eight at the time, and does not remember the details. He does remember being sent to a remote labor camp, where life was endless work from sunup to sundown, the only break being a meal of rice porridge in large bowls placed randomly on tables, so the hungry families would have to fight one another for their share. Sam stole food from the soldiers; he hid from work and caught fish. He trapped frogs in barrels and captured grasshoppers, roasting both over fire pits at night. He spent two years in that camp, and when the Vietnamese army invaded, he and his remaining family members were finally able to cross the border to Thailand. He spent two years in Thailand, working in markets and cooking simple meals with his mother to feed the other refugees. His aunt and uncle had managed to get to the United States, and they told Sam and his family of a wonderful place full of Cambodians called Lowell. There was work in the textile factories there.
Sam spoke no English when he arrived in Lowell. He washed dishes at a Chinese restaurant after school. When he finished high school, he started working on cars. In his twenties, he ran an auto body shop. He met Denise through his mother, the seamstress working on Denise’s sister’s wedding dress. The two married, worked hard, and sent their kids away to college and a better life. And that’s it. That should have been the end of a happy immigrant story.
But Sam had a secret desire: he wanted to cook. He had opened a restaurant/nightclub in the 1990s, but it failed. He took this hard, and never forgot it. So, at the age of fifty, he tried again, with Simply Khmer, this time cooking the food of his youth. And with nothing more than a faint memory of the dishes he had eaten as a child, he set about to create a menu of Cambodian cuisine with a new identity.
How do you trust a memory from when you were ten? I ask him. He shrugs and says that maybe it’s not exactly the same, but it’s close enough, and that he can feel it when it tastes right. That is what being Khmer must mean. I think back to when I was ten, to the things I ate then, and I wonder if I could re-create from memory what my grandmother cooked. I doubt I could.
Sam sits in front of me with his paper cook’s hat in hand, his face weathered and smiling, his expression humble. He probably does not realize that he is doing something most chefs cannot. He doesn’t consider himself remarkable. I’ve been cooking professionally and learning continuously since I was twenty. Sam lived an entire life of slow struggle before even walking into a restaurant kitchen. His story is not supposed to work. A person does not just start cooking at age fifty and create food this amazing. He tells me about a lobster dish he is working on because—well, he is in Massachusetts, and everyone here loves lobster. He talks about wanting to do frog legs, and liver-and-blood soup, and on and on.
The next night, Sam invites me to hang out with him in his kitchen. It is just he and three older Cambodian women who dash around the kitchen with ingredients in plastic bags. I watch one of them hammer away at green papaya ribbons with a large mortar and pestle until the air is filled with a sweet-and-sour aroma. Sam spends most of the evening shuffling his wok back and forth to the rhythms of the fire as it licks up around his hands. During slow moments, we walk back to the small courtyard behind his kitchen and share a cigarette. There are potted plants strewn across the concrete floor, herbs he can’t always find fresh at the market. He shows me all the smokers and ovens he is repairing. He is a borderline hoarder. His refrigerators and pantry exist in a state of disarray.
The first thing I learned in a professional kitchen was an uncompromising system of labeling and organization. It hurts my head, therefore, to see Sam’s ingredients in opaque bags, nothing labeled, with no discernible system in place. The women who work here are randomly stationed around the kitchen doing jobs that seem to have no direct correlation to the tickets piling up on the expo station. There is no brigade; no regimented line of chefs with clearly defined duties. There is only Sam. He thunders back in front of his wok and starts calling for ingredients, and his dutiful assistants bring him things: holy basil, bamboo shoots, pre-portioned pork in Ziploc bags. He works alone and furiously. Flames spit up to the ceiling. His voice grows steadily louder, until he is barking orders.
This dance, for all its chaos, now seems choreographed. Dishes come together at a rapid pace. A dented pot that looks like it came from my grandmother’s cupboard magically produces a soup of layered textures and colors; it is delivered to the dining room in large melamine bowls. The wok never cools down. As soon as one dish is plated, the wok is rinsed, and another chorus of ingredients gets sizzled.
Who is to say Sam’s system is flawed? Most professional cooks create a unified, seamless production line, but do we lose something in the process? In all his chaos, maybe Sam’s been able to retain some cryptic connection to his food.
And then, just like that, the rush is over. The ladies return to their random tasks, and the kitchen makes no sense again. While a waiter plates a dish of papaya salad, Sam and I resume our conversation. I stop short of giving him suggestions for how to better organize his pantry. Isn’t the food already delicious? Besides, we have much to learn from the foreign-born cook who has not been disciplined by the Western brigade system.
For most of my life, I have always looked to “ethnic” restaurants for the raw materials for my inspiration. I mine their ingredients and ideas and then “reinterpret” them on my menus, which is a nice way of saying that I make their dishes more palatable to an audience that is not used to foods that are too aggressive or spicy. My system, in many ways, is exploitative. I take ideas from another culture and smooth out the edges for a more refined (some might say bland) palat
e. As chefs of a modern age, many of my peers do the same thing. Even Sam, in his search for a better dish, is refining his food, taking the things he ate at the refugee camp and turning them into something more delicate, polished. I am sure some Cambodians who eat at his restaurant tell him his food is not authentic, not like that from the village where they originated. But in order for any cuisine to evolve, it has to be passed on to people who have not lived the authentic life from which it germinated. Still, if a dish becomes completely unrecognizable, what has become of the cuisine and the tradition from which it was born? There are no easy answers, but when I experience what Sam does, eat what he cooks, I understand that his process is much more complex than I originally thought. When I stand next to him in his kitchen, I do so as a student, not a collector.
Sam has found his voice in Lowell. Denise watches from the expo line as orders stream in. She is proud of him; you can see it in her eyes. I can’t name the specific rules for what makes a great restaurant, but I know I am standing in one. I’m in an unspectacular kitchen in the middle of a town that most food writers would never visit, and I’m watching magic being made. I can see the strength of love between husband and wife toiling away, erasing the tragedy of their upbringing by creating something celebratory—and I don’t want to let go of this energy. I’m envious.
I stay until the end of service. We talk a little more, until it gets too late to talk anymore. When I walk out into the night, I am reminded that I’m in Lowell, and that there’s not much happening here. The city is miserably quiet. Sam and Denise drive away, and I look back at the restaurant, dark and unassuming now. It looks like any other place built on a budget. If you didn’t know what was behind the doors, you would never dream of interrupting your travels to stop here.