when you want, where you want.
Bong Is Cambodia by Way of Crown Heights
Photo: Hugo Yu
That opening a restaurant — even in a restaurant-mad town like this one — is a fool’s errand is so well established it barely needs saying. The costs are high, the rewards few, the work grinding, the success rate minuscule. Want to make money with a restaurant? Sell it to the next sucker.
That anyone does it anyway is a blessing to the rest of us, courtesy of those with a combination of talent, truculence, carnival barkerism, and need. I’m willing to bet that Chakriya Un, the chef of Bong in an unassuming Brooklyn storefront, is one of them. Un (who goes by “Cha”) has spent the better part of the past decade as an itinerant evangelist for the Cambodian food she grew up eating. Under the name Kreung — the spice-and-herb pastes that provide the base of much Cambodian cooking — she popped up at mai tai bars and chicken places and wherever else she could get a berth.
Bong (a Khmer term of endearment and respect) is her first permanent restaurant. Open since June, Bong actually started announcing itself sometime in mid-July, and it remains open only Friday through Sunday. Its outdoor patio is a couple of lawn tables on the concrete, and it didn’t receive a license to sell beer and wine until mid-August, after I’d visited. Reservations go quickly, and the place is too small to accept walk-ins. On top of it all, Un is nine months’ pregnant. During two recent dinners, I watched her overseeing kitchen operations from a seated perch on a step stool.
Despite all the obstacles and little irritants, Bong is delicious and worth the minor headache of finding your way in. Like their compatriots Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns of Ha’s Snack Bar, with whom they once shared a pop-up kitchen, Un and her partner, Alexander Chaparro (who is also her fiancé), have carved out a space in the dining industry’s inhospitable wilderness. The results can be thrilling.
Khmer cooking is underrepresented in the city, and the last great Cambodian restaurant, Angkor, closed during the pandemic. It’s a strong-flavored cuisine, sour, fishy, and fermented, less spicy than those of its neighbors. Cha kapiek, a dip of shrimp paste, chiles, and peanuts served with crudités and a giant undulant shrimp chip, is so funky, almost loamy, with fermented shrimp paste that I thought it might start growing moss.
Many of Un’s dishes are borrowed, sometimes with alterations and sometimes not, from her mother, Kim Eng Mann, known as Mama Kim. Mama Kim’s lobster is a big messy pile of claw, roe, and tail oozing over a mound of rice. Mama Kim is deeply involved in Bong, procuring ingredients (including catching fish herself for fish paste) and bringing over homemade ferments. Un understands that authenticity is useful as both a kitchen practice and a marketing tool, especially when it’s seasoned with a little mystery. The lobster is a secret recipe, Un is fond of saying, though it clearly has plenty of ginger; I also detected lemongrass, galangal, and all the complexity that comes from her hand-pounded kreungs. Mama Kim, Chaparro told a fellow diner, described Bong’s food as “good for Americans.” Authenticity also means knowing when enough is enough.
Photo: Hugo Yu
Photo: Hugo Yu
Not every dish at Bong seems settled into its final form. A salad of melon and cucumber was garlicky and fishy, but the bacon-y pork-jowl crisps arrived cold. Fried ringlets of golden squid had gone a bit gummy in their salted-egg-yolk sauce. A thick bone-in pork chop was more tender at the bone than in the slices, but I didn’t much care because 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 could jar it for sale and retire from the restaurant business once and for all.
The star of the menu is a whole dorade fried to crisp smokiness. Some Cambodian preparations call for steaming the fish with aromatics in a banana leaf or simply frying it whole. Un’s is first coated in toasted rice powder, which fries into a crackling crust. Scored into little flaking diamonds of flesh and skin, it’s delicious, ready to be wrapped in lettuce leaves; showered with Vietnamese coriander, basil, and fish mint; and dunked into tamarind sauce or sweetened fish sauce. I never figured I’d be deboning a whole fish by hand on a Crown Heights sidewalk, but this is a showstopper. “Chef calls the dorade ‘Beyoncé,’ ” our server said.
I look forward to the day when reservations are not a fight, when the three days of service become most of the week, the return visit when I can wash everything down with cold beer. But restaurants take time and money and sweat. At one meal, I spied Mama Kim herself, who fled the Khmer Rouge and still has the embedded shrapnel to prove it, eating with her husband at one of the tables. On the way out, I complimented her lobster and wondered about the secret recipe. She laughed. “I’m just glad to see her sitting down,” Chaparro told me when I mentioned it. Until three weeks ago, she was working on the line.
Bong
DIY ART
The trippy Day-Glo peacock mural in the restroom is by Un and Chaparro.
Showing Up
I have it on good authority that if you happen to arrive at just the right time, exceptions can be made to Bong’s no-walk-ins policy.
Taking Leave
Bong’s food will soon be in the hands of two line cooks and a sous-chef-in-training who worked under Un, as she takes care of the new baby.
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