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Living —  Lifestyle

Carving an official Cambodia Town out of South Philadelphia

Updated: MAY 14, 2015 — 8:32 AM EDT

Ira Son (left) grills traditional Cambodian food in South Philadelphia at a festival in early May. There is an effort afoot to officially call the culture-rich area Cambodia Town. ( DAVID MAIALETTI / Staff Photographer )

by Joy Manning, For The Inquirer

On sunny weekend afternoons, in the shadow of an ornate, golden Buddhist temple, Mifflin Square in South Philadelphia is dotted with charcoal grills, chile-lacquered chicken wings, and thin-sliced fatty beef heavily seasoned with lemongrass sputtering over the coals. Women pound chilies, garlic, and dried shrimp to a paste to season the snappy unripe papaya for the lime-drenched salads they sell to passersby.

 SLIDESHOW

This is what some people call Cambodia Town, where these authentic street foods sell for $1, and where there's an effort afoot to make the title official. Though there are other places throughout the city that are rich in Cambodian culture - similar vendors sell snacks in Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park, and there's a new temple under construction in Southwest Philadelphia - the area around Mifflin Square is the heart of this community. Business owners, city officials, and Cambodian Americans think it's time to raise the profile of their culture - especially its bold, bright, and balanced cuisine.

"Philadelphia is a major concentration of Cambodian immigrants," says Brandon Duk, whose father, Danny, fled the genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s. "We have the fourth-largest Cambodian population in the U.S.," he says. Even though Brandon Duk has lived his whole life in South Philly, has never traveled to Southeast Asia, and strongly prefers hamburgers to the foods cooked and sold along Mifflin Square, he is well-versed in the history of his family's homeland.

With his extended family, Danny Duk co-owns Khmer Kitchen. It's probably the best-known Cambodian food spot in Philadelphia, but Khmer Kitchen is surrounded by other Cambodian restaurants and groceries that few people even realize are there. That's part of the reason why Duk is so motivated to bring people together around the cause of creating an official Cambodia Town. He thinks that by banding together, the community can show the rest of the city - and our many food-focused tourists - how vibrant Cambodian culture is here.

Duk takes me on a mini-tour of the area he sees as the future Cambodia Town. Though hard boundaries haven't been established, he thinks it should encompass the blocks of Sixth and Seventh Streets that run between Morris Street and Oregon Avenue. We start with his favorite grocery, Chai Hong Market, at the corner of Seventh and Jackson Streets. The small space is piled high with ingredients unfamiliar to most Westerners, including the alien-looking winged beans that Duk explains are integral to Cambodian curries.

Before we leave the shop, Duk picks up several warm bundles wrapped with banana leaves and filled with fragrant sticky rice studded with banana, coconut, and candy-sweet jackfruit. "This is my favorite dessert," he says.

Another defining bite along these blocks is kuy teav, the soup that may be the final foodie frontier in Philadelphia in terms of Asian noodle bowls.

"It's the original pho," Duk says with considerable pride. "Cambodians invented this soup." He proceeds to season my bowl with all the correct additions - an enormous amount of black pepper, plenty of hot sauce, and a generous spoonful of "instant beef flavor paste." The soup is full of shrimp, meatballs, and tripe, and the fatty broth is as rich and soulful as its more famous Vietnamese cousin.

"People should come here to taste this," he says, and tells me that he and his family are in the early planning stages of opening a second Cambodian restaurant devoted exclusively to soups. Until then, he recommends slurping a bowl at nearby Heng Seng Restaurant or at I Heart Cambodia.

Anna Hitchens, a first-generation American whose parents also fled the genocide, thinks the creation of an official Cambodia Town would benefit the whole community. Her company, Koliyan, runs Cambodian cooking workshops and tasting events. Her parents also immigrated to the area around Oregon Avenue when they came to the United States from Cambodia. Like Duk, her work revolves around bringing the flavors of her heritage to a wider audience.

"The Italian Market is a destination people know about - you go there to taste cool stuff and explore Italian culture. If there was a designated corridor highlighting Cambodian businesses, people would visit," Hitchens says. The revenue from increased foot traffic could be key to helping the community set up a Business Improvement District, which could, in turn, deal with one of the neighborhood's most vexing and familiar problems: cleaning up trash.

City Councilman Mark Squilla agrees that an official Cambodia Town would be good for the people of his district. He's been active in meeting with Cambodian business owners and trying to connect them with city resources. The first hurdle is getting a formal group in place, such as a business association - typically, a precursor to the more formal (and costly) Business Improvement District.

"When you get organized, you automatically gain more influence in the political process," says Squilla, who would like to see Cambodian business owners connect with the city's commerce department to apply for grants to spruce up their building's facades. That, he says, would be a first project.

For Danny Duk, the effort goes beyond picking up trash and drawing in new visitors. "I want Cambodian people to stay here, to open their businesses here. I don't want this community to break up because people decide to move away," he says. To that end, he's been offering his restaurant as a meeting place where neighbors and city representatives can talk and plan. And he spreads the word to everyone he knows, which is to say, everyone in this corner of South Philadelphia. He shows me a letter from the Cambodian embassy granting its blessing for the creation of an official Cambodia Town in Philadelphia, its imprimatur infusing him with energy.

Food is an alluring path into learning about a different culture - it draws people out of their own backyards. "Restaurants keep a culture alive," Squilla says. And Duk's Khmer Kitchen is proof of that. "People drive from New York and Baltimore and sometimes wait two hours for a table." It's not hard to understand why they would travel for the restaurant's irresistible prah-hok kahteeh, savory caramelized pork made even richer with coconut that you scoop up with crunchy raw vegetables, and nyum sahdau, a seriously spicy salad the sports exotic bitter flower petals and peanuts.

People of Cambodian descent visit our "Cambodian Town" in part because most other cities don't have an enclave of Cambodian community and culture like we do here in Philadelphia. But of course they also come for the food. "They say it tastes like home," Duk says.

Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/living/20150514_Carving_an_official_Cambodia_Town_out_of_South_Philadelphia.html#zJuXmdVC7A1HdW92.99

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