Nite Yun has no memories of the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand where she was born in 1982.
The chef and owner of Nyum Bai in Oakland, Calif., a restaurant that has attracted national attention, was just 2 when her parents, Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge in the previous decade, scooped up her and her older brother and headed to America, sponsored by a family affiliated with a church group. They eventually settled in Stockton, drawn there because a family friend said the hot weather and farmland would remind them of Cambodia.
The family spoke Khmer at home, but Ms. Yun’s parents didn’t talk much about their days in Cambodia under the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime. “It was a very uncomfortable, sensitive topic,” Ms. Yun said. “To this day, I still don’t know how my parents met.”
Her main point of access to her family’s history was what she had for dinner in that one-bedroom apartment in Stockton: catfish, dried out until it shriveled to the texture of jerky, that she ate with her hands, along with scoops of green mango salad. Soups of pumpkins, squash, bitter gourds, bay leaves and toasted rice powder, all floating in broth given some funk from prahok, a fermented fish paste elemental to Cambodian cooking. Bowls of jasmine rice. Always rice.
Taken literally, the phrase “nyum bai” is Khmer for “eat rice.” But when used in conversation, Ms. Yun explained, it’s more of a greeting that translates to an emphatic invitation: “Let’s eat.” It was only natural that Ms. Yun, 36, named her first restaurant Nyum Bai.
“My mom would always say this to my friends in high school,” Ms. Yun said. “It was an easy way to make them feel at home.”
A self-described introvert, she sprints through sentences, as if slightly dazed about how quickly her restaurant’s profile has risen. In August, the food magazine Bon Appétit added Nyum Bai to its annual “Hot Ten” list of the country’s best new restaurants.
That recognition has been hard for her to wrap her head around. “Everything’s been so surreal so far,” she said. “My main focus always was to promote Cambodian food.”
Nyum Bai began in 2014 as a pop-up in the Mission district of San Francisco that Ms. Yun started with the help of La Cocina, a nonprofit business incubator for female food entrepreneurs. She grew it into a kiosk in the city of Emeryville in 2017 before opening a brick-and-mortar location in February in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland.
The restaurant is tiny, its walls lined with replicas of Cambodian rock records from the 1950s and ‘60s. A playlist of 15 songs from those years, with heavy beats and an abundance of crooning, cycles through lunch and dinner.
Ms. Yun didn’t set foot in Cambodia until 2007, when she dropped out of nursing school and found herself adrift. Traveling there had always been at the back of her mind; she saw her family’s history as a puzzle she needed to solve.
So when she found a credit card while sifting through unopened mail, she didn’t hesitate. She booked a ticket to Phnom Penh.
Once there, Ms. Yun learned that the Cambodian civil war had decimated once-vibrant aspects of Cambodian culture, including the work of artists and intellectuals. War also decimated the country’s food culture. “Aunts, grandmas and moms who held onto the recipes and ways of cooking traditional, pure Khmer food all died during the war,” she said.
During visits over the next few years, Ms. Yun worried that the American public thought of Cambodia only in terms of the Angkor Wat, poverty or genocide, and that they had no knowledge of Cambodian food.
“Cambodian cuisine has not made the same impact in the States as Vietnamese and Thai,” said Nadsa de Monteiro, the Cambodian-born former executive chef of the Elephant Walk, a Cambodian restaurant in Boston since 1991. “It is a bit more challenging in flavors than Thai or Vietnamese, the culture a bit more obscure.” Ms. de Monteiro added that there is “little understanding of its geographical location and its plight and essence.”
Few Cambodian restaurants in America exist outside enclaves with large populations of Cambodian immigrants like Stockton and Long Beach, Calif., and Lowell, Mass. There were only a handful of Cambodian restaurants in the Bay Area before Nyum Bai, said Luke Tsai, the food editor of San Francisco magazine.
“They tended to be mom-and-pop operations run by an older generation of immigrants,” Mr. Tsai said of those restaurants. “Compared to Nyum Bai, they tend to have lengthy, wide-ranging menus intended to please customers looking for a more general Southeast Asian dining experience: lots of curries listed by color, stir-fries with mix-and-match proteins and often a fair number of Thai and Vietnamese dishes thrown into the mix.”
Nyum Bai’s menu is compact and staunchly Cambodian, with starters like a ngoum banana salad. It’s a tangy jumble of banana blossoms, cabbage, basil, green and red bell peppers, crushed peanuts, mint and cucumbers sitting in a sweet, shallow pool of lime dressing. For an entree of kuri, a coconut milk chicken curry with roasted potatoes, Ms. Yun uses kroeung, a paste she makes from lemongrass, turmeric, garlic, shallots, makrut lime leaves and galangal.
“These are the dishes that my mom would cook from her memory,” Ms. Yun said of her menu. She hews closely to traditional Khmer cooking, which was nearly a casualty of genocide. For a time, these recipes existed only in the minds of those who had escaped the country. Ms. Yun’s kuy teav Phnom Penh, a rich and earthy pork noodle soup, is just like her mother’s.
“These are the ways the Khmer still have recipes,” she said. “We’re cooking through memories of taste.”
