That opening a restaurant — even in a restaurant-mad city like this one — is a idiot’s errand is so effectively established it barely wants saying. The prices are excessive, the rewards few, the work grinding, the success price minuscule. Wish to generate profits with a restaurant? Promote it to the subsequent sucker.
That anybody does it anyway is a blessing to the remainder of us, courtesy of these with a mixture of expertise, truculence, carnival barkerism, and wish. I’m keen to wager that Chakriya Un, the chef of Bong in an unassuming Brooklyn storefront, is one in all them. Un (who goes by “Cha”) has spent the higher a part of the previous decade as an itinerant evangelist for the Cambodian meals she grew up consuming. Underneath the identify Kreung — the spice-and-herb pastes that present the bottom of a lot Cambodian cooking — she popped up at mai tai bars and rooster locations and wherever else she might get a berth.
Bong (a Khmer time period of endearment and respect) is her first everlasting restaurant. Open since June, Bong really began saying itself someday in mid-July, and it stays open solely Friday by way of Sunday. Its outside patio is a few garden tables on the concrete, and it didn’t obtain a license to promote beer and wine till mid-August, after I’d visited. Reservations go shortly, and the place is just too small to just accept walk-ins. On prime of all of it, Un is 9 months’ pregnant. Throughout two current dinners, I watched her overseeing kitchen operations from a seated perch on a step stool.
Regardless of all of the obstacles and little irritants, Bong is scrumptious and definitely worth the minor headache of discovering your method in. Like their compatriots Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns of Ha’s Snack Bar, with whom they as soon as shared a pop-up kitchen, Un and her accomplice, Alexander Chaparro (who can be her fiancé), have carved out an area within the eating trade’s inhospitable wilderness. The outcomes may be thrilling.
Khmer cooking is underrepresented within the metropolis, and the final nice Cambodian restaurant, Angkor, closed in the course of the pandemic. It’s a strong-flavored delicacies, bitter, fishy, and fermented, much less spicy than these of its neighbors. Cha kapiek, a dip of shrimp paste, chiles, and peanuts served with crudités and an enormous undulant shrimp chip, is so funky, nearly loamy, with fermented shrimp paste that I assumed it’d begin rising moss.
Lots of Un’s dishes are borrowed, generally with alterations and generally not, from her mom, Kim Eng Mann, generally known as Mama Kim. Mama Kim’s lobster is a giant messy pile of claw, roe, and tail oozing over a mound of rice. Mama Kim is deeply concerned in Bong, procuring elements (together with catching fish herself for fish paste) and bringing over do-it-yourself ferments. Un understands that authenticity is helpful as each a kitchen observe and a advertising device, particularly when it’s seasoned with a bit thriller. The lobster is a secret recipe, Un is fond of claiming, although it clearly has loads of ginger; I additionally detected lemongrass, galangal, and all of the complexity that comes from her hand-pounded kreungs. Mama Kim, Chaparro instructed a fellow diner, described Bong’s meals as “good for Individuals.” Authenticity additionally means realizing when sufficient is sufficient.
Bong’s eating room, whole-fried dorade. Hugo Yu.
Bong’s eating room, whole-fried dorade. Hugo Yu.
Not each dish at Bong appears settled into its closing type. A salad of melon and cucumber was garlicky and fishy, however the bacon-y pork-jowl crisps arrived chilly. Fried ringlets of golden squid had gone a bit gummy of their salted-egg-yolk sauce. A thick bone-in pork chop was extra tender on the bone than within the slices, however I didn’t a lot care as a result of it had been bathed in tuk trey ping poh, a chutneyish sauce of Sungold and Sunpeach tomatoes curing in fish sauce, sugar, and lime. Un might jar it on the market and retire from the restaurant enterprise as soon as and for all.
The star of the menu is a complete dorade fried to crisp smokiness. Some Cambodian preparations name for steaming the fish with aromatics in a banana leaf or just frying it entire. Un’s is first coated in toasted rice powder, which fries right into a crackling crust. Scored into little flaking diamonds of flesh and pores and skin, it’s scrumptious, able to be wrapped in lettuce leaves; showered with Vietnamese coriander, basil, and fish mint; and dunked into tamarind sauce or sweetened fish sauce. I by no means figured I’d be deboning a complete fish by hand on a Crown Heights sidewalk, however it is a showstopper. “Chef calls the dorade ‘Beyoncé,’ ” our server mentioned.
I look ahead to the day when reservations will not be a combat, when the three days of service turn into a lot of the week, the return go to after I can wash every little thing down with chilly beer. However eating places take money and time and sweat. At one meal, I spied Mama Kim herself, who fled the Khmer Rouge and nonetheless has the embedded shrapnel to show it, consuming together with her husband at one of many tables. On the way in which out, I complimented her lobster and questioned in regards to the secret recipe. She laughed. “I’m simply glad to see her sitting down,” Chaparro instructed me after I talked about it. Till three weeks in the past, she was engaged on the road.
DIY ART
The trippy Day-Glo peacock mural within the restroom is by Un and Chaparro.
Displaying Up
I’ve it on good authority that in the event you occur to reach at simply the appropriate time, exceptions may be made to Bong’s no-walk-ins coverage.
Taking Depart
Bong’s meals will quickly be within the fingers of two line cooks and a sous-chef-in-training who labored underneath Un, as she takes care of the brand new child.
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New York Journal.
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