Sam Oum, the founder of Cambodian barbecue pop-up Kreung Kitchen, feels your pain.
Does Long Beach’s lock-on Cambodian food leave you feeling left out?
Oum was born to Cambodian parents in Thailand’s Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in the early 80s. A church group later sponsored the family’s move to North Carolina in 1983. Gradually, while working steadily in insurance and financial service sales through the years, migrated west.
He first landed in Cleveland, then Arizona, and finally, in 2011, in Long Beach, which has the largest population of people with Cambodian heritage outside of the country. There, he reveled in the surfeit of Southeast Asian restaurants, selling everything from traditional Cambodian samlor kako and mee ka la noodles to puffy pizzas spread with tom yum and Thai curry.
Moving to Culver City to be with his partner, Christina, this treasure chest of Cambodian eats suddenly felt so far away. He wondered why Cambodian food had to be so isolated from the rest of the city.
Despite having no background in cooking and feeling fairly disconnected from his heritage, he wondered if he could not do something about it.
“I can't believe, you know, we live in a big place like L.A., and there's really no Cambodian food out here,” he recalls telling his mother periodically through the years. “So I was just like, ‘it'd be crazy if I actually were the one to present Cambodian food out to this side of town.’”
At the time, Oum had been calling Mom back home for help in slowly learning the recipes and techniques she’d share, like using a mortar and pestle to mash spices. Christina frequently encouraged his dreams of bringing Cambodian cuisine to a wider swath of L.A., but he remained full of self-doubt.
“My mom had a stroke in 2022, and it just really declined her health,” Oum tells L.A. TACO. “And right before she passed last November, one of the last things she told me was, stop talking about it and just do it.’ So, that really lit a fire under my butt to just get the food out there.”
Kreung Kitchen served its first order on January 1, 2024. Today, the team is busy setting up a handful of pop-ups and catering gigs for Cambodian-style barbeque each week at different, drink-friendly establishments. His tents and flaming grill will be found in neighborhoods including Torrance, Santa Monica, North Hollywood, Hawthorne, and Culver City, where Kreung appears weekly at Hi-Ho Liquor.
Just follow your nose through a thick cloud of smoke that smells sweetly like lemongrass, garlic, and steak. There, you’ll find Kreung’s tent, Oum in the back laying skewers of pork belly and beef, chicken thighs, short ribs, and two sausages across a length of char-encrusted, propane-fired grates.
Kreung’s meats are all served tender and elaborately packed with spices.
Lithe skewers of lemongrass beef, a ubiquitous mainstay of Cambodian cuisine, deliver an initial hit of char before dissolving into the flavors of hand-chopped flap steak marinated for an hour or two in the lemongrass-based paste known as “kreung” (from which this pop up takes its name); sweet little hints of oyster sauce, coconut milk, sugar, galangal, and makrut lime making brief appearances along the way.
Kreung's stubby twako sausages are also beef-based, bearing prominent acidic notes like the ones we’ve come to expect in the pork-based chorizo obtained at our local Oaxacan butcher. Oum tells us that these luscious sour flavors come from the fermentation of the jasmine rice included among the red medley encased in these weenies, which is left to set out for a few days. The resulting twako is tangy and spicy, beefy juices bursting with every snap of their skin.
Skewers of pork belly, baked before being finished on the grill, make for savory meat candy. The silky fat is rendered masterfully to melt in your mouth, leaving a crisp ribbon of a crust clinging to a soft strata of pork spiced with black pepper, garlic, ginger, and sugar to savor. Lemongrass chicken thighs are plump, tender, and delicious.
“Everyone can identify with grilled meats," Oum says. “I felt like [that was] the easiest vessel for us to get Cambodian flavors in front of people, of getting people curious about the cuisine.”
To complete his Cambodian barbecue combo meals, Oum builds each plate with a hill of rice made with coconut milk, lime leaf, and coconut corn and a small salad with a vinegary fish sauce that cuts through the fatty oils gathering in your maw. Heat levels can be adjusted, measured by the different variations of Yeak, a Cambodian hot sauce made by his friend, on offer.
One of Oum’s biggest joys has been watching customers who say they’ve “never had Cambodian food” take their first bite, eyes lighting up and heads nodding, then seeing them return another day.
“That's the mission we set out for us,” Oum says. “To introduce people to these flavors and to see people are enjoying them. That's rewarding all in itself.”
Not only is Kreung Kitchen giving a broader swath of L.A. their taste of Cambodian food and culture, but it has ignited and deepened Oum’s connections to his heritage.
“I didn't really have a sense of identity, as far as cultural identity, growing up,” he says. “As a matter of fact, I was actually ashamed to be Cambodian at one point, and it was just because I didn't have anyone to really identify with.”
Oum says this changed as he got older and began delving into the country’s rich history and art, endowing him with pride and a longing to learn more about the culture. Living in Long Beach, I was part of this journey.
Today, cooking Cambodian food serves as a bridge to his Cambodian heritage and childhood memory, as well as the mother who supported his dream and taught him her recipes. After decades of doing work he says was “sucking the soul out of me,” he feels he’s finally walking the path to his greater purpose.
“Cooking gives me fond memories of my childhood, like of my mom's cooking and, like, music that she would listen to, the smells,” he says. “Now I get to tell my story and introduce them because food is a gateway into a culture, a good way to get people curious about, you know, what's the culture that's behind this food. It feels like I'm just kind of hanging out. I meet so many different people from different walks of life. It literally feels like I'm not even working.”
Check out Kreung Kitchen’s Instagram for its schedule of planned pop-ups.
