Does Long Beach’s lock-on Cambodian food leave you feeling left out?
Sam Oum, the founder of Cambodian barbecue pop-up Kreung Kitchen, feels your pain.
Oum was born to Cambodian parents in Thailand’s Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in the early 1980s. A church group sponsored the family’s move to North Carolina in In 1983 and eventually, Oum migrated west as a young adult working in insurance and financial service sales.
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 U.S. There, Oum reveled in a 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.