US Cambodia Cuisine is Connecting Khmer-Americans with their Culture
Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2018 5:59 pm
Two articles here on Nite Yun who arrived in the US as a refugee, and is now running Nyum Bai, a Cambodian restaurant in California.
How Nite Yun Is Helping Cambodians Connect to Their Culture
31 August 2018
“There’s not a lot of Cambodian restaurants or Cambodian chefs [in the US],” notes chef Nite Yun — a 2018 Eater Young Gun and the owner of Nyum Bai in Oakland, California. The realization came to Yun while she was living in San Francisco and missing her mom’s cooking, immediately inspiring her to learn to prepare those dishes for herself.
She began by calling her mom who would share all her recipes, and then by traveling around Cambodia, visiting her grandmother and learning more about Cambodian culture — that’s when she decided to open Nyum Bai.
And though Yun accepts the responsibility of representing Cambodian cuisine in the States, she’s hopeful for the first generation and second generation Cambodians who are reconnecting with their roots again through food. For now, she’s thankful for a place where she can cook up the food that she grew up eating, and share it with all of Oakland.
https://www.eater.com/2018/8/31/1779952 ... rnia-video
Previous article on her restaurant...
Nite Yun’s Cambodian Restaurant Is the Talk of California
The chef created a restaurant where Cambodians can reconnect with their culture
by Rachel Khong Jul 19, 2018, 11:12am EDT
That I’m eating kuy teav phnom penh, Cambodian rice noodle soup with minced pork, minutes from the BART station in Fruitvale, Oakland, feels akin to magic. It’s perfect — savory and slightly sweet and comforting, the perfect food. And Nyum Bai — open since this past February — feels something like magic, too.
Its patio shares space with a store selling miscellany — poignant-feeling Hillary Clinton piñatas. On a Saturday afternoon, the restaurant is all millennials — the exception is two tiny babies — while sixties Cambodian rock plays in the background, all warbling singing and frenetic drums. Behind a window, the Cambodian-American chef/owner, Nite Yun, cooks some of the Bay Area’s best Cambodian food. “I hope that this is a space where first- and second-generation Cambodians can come and reconnect with their heritage and country,” Yun says, though that wasn’t always her mission. From the incubator program La Cocina, to pop-ups, to a brick-and-mortar in Emeryville, and now her restaurant in Fruitvale, cooking was not always what she’d planned.
https://www.eater.com/2018/7/19/1756609 ... s-nyum-bai