Angkor — Chicago's Only Cambodian Restaurant is in Lombard

In another thread pocketcontents wrote:Longtime lurker, first time poster. I've lived here for 11 years and haven't seen much by way of Cambodian food, but it looks like there's a new restaurant dishing it out along with Thai standbys and seafood. Wouldn't have found it if not for some endless scrolling through Facebook.

Angkor Restaurant
http://www.angkorasiancuisine.com/
52 W. Roosevelt Rd.
Lombard

I don't drive, so I haven't been. Would be curious to know what LTHers think if anyone goes.

Thank you for the tip. Those few sentences, the most interesting here in a long time, came and went without comment. But they didn't go unnoticed.

Arriving 11 years ago, you missed Chicago's only real Cambodian restaurant (though take-out window, rather than restaurant, might be a more accurate description). Teevy Café closed about 13 years ago, after barely a year in business. Teevy was a somewhat frustrating restaurant—excellent on one visit, not so good the next. I'm convinced different people cooked at different times.

Angkor Restaurant holds down the west end of a small strip mall on Roosevelt Road that has Mumbai Café—itself worth a visit—at the other.





The menu tends toward Thai, but about a dozen typical Khmer dishes are scattered throughout. We started with an apple and shrimp salad, not exactly Cambodian, but a dish the owner was enthusiastic about. It was good.



The nuoc cham-like sweet and spicy sauce works well with the slightly sour apple.

Two variants of noum binh chuk, a classic Khmer rice noodle dish, are offered—the usual green as well as the more festive red.





The presentation is interesting—the compressed noodle pads are to be broken up and mixed with the seasoned fish paste and vegetables. Very pleasant, mildly fishy, mellow flavors here.

Mellow flavors characterize much of the cooking, including cha krueng, the typical stir-fried Cambodian curry.



Lacking Thai pyrotechnics or the piercing saltiness of some Vietnamese cooking, this dish offers a harmonious blend of familiar Southeast Asian flavors like turmeric and lemongrass.

Machew krueng is one of the many sour Cambodian soups.





Angkor's version has only slight sourness to offset the fatty richness of the beef broth. Banana peppers and green papaya are hardly dominant, but contribute quietly to another muted, but delicious dish. A version with coconut milk is also offered.

The few desserts should be familiar to Thai food fans. Palm seed pudding is slices of the canned fruit in a broth of sticky rice and coconut.



Angkor offers a lunch special with a few Khmer dishes including kathiew, the pork and noodle soup often eaten for breakfast.

Angkor Restaurant
52 W Roosevelt Rd
Lombard IL
630-576-2000
http://www.angkorasiancuisine.com/
https://www.facebook.com/angkorasiancuisine/
Tue-Sat 11-10; Sun 11-8

wat is this all about?

Excellent find. I've never had Cambodian food before, and it definitely shares a lot of flavors of Thai and Lao food but way less spicy. I had the green noum binh chuk and the apple and shrimp salad, both extremely aromatic and flavorful. They also have a large selection of seafood that may warrant a dinner visit.

Hello all I got to check this place out with my Mother yesterday and very much enjoyed our lunch. Andy, his wife Eng, and crew were very gracious and very informative about Cambodian/Khmer cuisine which prior to coming here I knew nothing about lol!

We first tried the shrimp green apple salad which was very good.

Next dish was Amok with is a fish dish cooked with coconut milk, spices, and served with white rice, delicious!

They have Thai dishes like pad thai which was very solid.

All in all an excellent place to try!

I believe they're closed on Mondays



How do I post more than one picture in this same post?

Here is a shot of the shrimp/green apple salad after we attacked it!

Amok

After Mild Bites, Mudfish and Durian

Some weeks ago at Tom Yum Café on Chicago’s north side, we spotted Cambodian Fried Rice on the menu. Had to have it because none of us, all long-time food enthusiasts, had ever eaten much Cambodian cuisine. The veg stir-fried with rice left us flat-lining after first bites: it was inoffensive but lacked personality, distinctive flavors; first bites failed to beckon seconds. This may very well not have been a good representation of Cambodian food, so when I heard about Angkor, I was eager to go.



At Angkor last Friday night, the must-have was Machew Krueng. Kruengs come in red, green and yellow versions, at least that I know of; there may, like moles, be many variations on these spice mixtures, incorporating garlic, galangal, turmeric and usually many more ingredients pounded together and added to soups and other preparations. Perhaps similar to French master sauces, kruengs seem fundamental to Cambodian food, giving it a distinctive flavor and distinguishing it from regional cuisines of Thailand and Vietnam.

The Machew Krueng was delicious and beautiful, with some sourness from green papaya and perhaps pickle, meaty rib eye steak and very slight heat from banana peppers. Co-owner/chef Eng Treng told me she holds back a little of the more extreme flavors so as not to turn off gringos. I totally understand, but it’s also very possible that Cambodian food is just not as aggressive as, say, Thai. In Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast, Carolyn and I ate a load of stuff and none of it approached the heat and spiciness of just about any of the food we had in Thailand.

If you’re used to Mexican food, and most of us are, you may perhaps understandably expect the same tongue-tingling, capsaicin-driven rush when eating food of other Latin American countries. And just as you may find Costa Rican or San Salvadoran food relatively lacking in the impact one expects with Mexican, so does Cambodian food (based on my very limited sample) seem absent the chili intensity of Thai food.

That said, we highly enjoyed our meal at Angkor.



We had the Angkor Special, a fried rice (had to see what their version was like), and it benefited hugely from tiny nuggets of red Chinese sausage that lent a sweet note and also visual interest to the usual array of grain and veg. Life-changing? Nuh-ungh. But good.

Amok, another off-menu item, was a table favorite in a mild cocoanut milk sauce, quite subtle, good natural flavors predominating, which as I say, could be a consequence of constraint in the kitchen or the milder nature of the Cambodian culinary tradition, or likely both. Our server told us the fish used in this preparation was basa (a type of catfish), but I’m guessing that ingredient varies, here and in Cambodia, based on availability.



Eng told me she Mudfish, but she was shy about offering it to gringos, so that’s exactly what we wanted. She seemed excited to serve us some, and when it arrived at the table, my friend Alec Barclay (who has a much more sensitive palate than me) exclaimed, “Wow, THAT has an aroma.” The mudfish slurry (which contained some chilies – at last, heat!) was in the center of the plate and around the periphery were arranged sliced raw vegetables; this is very similar to what seems the standard serving arrangement for nam prik, the Thai “salsa.” I’m sure there’s a more descriptive name than “Mudfish” for this dish; it’s not on the menu. I kept eating more, fascinated by new flavors.



For dessert, Durian – the King of Fruits – over coconut rice. This was another off-menu item, which the folks here seem eager to serve if you let them know you’re game to try new things. Of the durian, which came chunky in a creamy sauce, Carolyn mentioned she liked it “more than ever before,” though she hastened to add this was a “relative” statement though now she “could actually understand how people might develop a taste for this dish, not that I have.” Durian is a powerful flavor – sweet and sulphurous – and I’ve liked it much more in shakes and preparations like this than I ever have raw. Our Oak Park neighbor Chris Miller compared durian to full baby diapers (sorry, his analogy, not mine, though not totally off-base).

As we were leaving, I asked Eng and Andy if it might be possible to have a larger dinner at their restaurant, with maybe 20 or so people, where maybe they could cut loose and prepare food in the style they had back home. Eng’s eyes got really big, and she smiled “Yes, yes, I could do that!” If a traditional Cambodian dinner like this might appeal to you, let me know by posting your interest here.



Postscript: Thanks to pocketcontents for hounding out Angkor and to ReneG for following up (Peter, years ago I think we ordered in from Teevy during an afternoon at Hopleaf, right?). When we started LTHForum.com many years ago, our plan was to focus on the little places that give us happiness. Over the years, many of us (including me) sometimes seem to have had Perrier water on the brain, forgetting our original intent and focusing on wow-it’s-now openings and hotspots which, though many times worthy, tend to steal our focus away from the little, mom and pop places that originally inspired us. It was good to get back to an off-radar place like Angkor, representative of tiny restaurants that are important in so many ways to food culture in Chicago and to this forum.

I'd definitely be interested in a group outing to Angkor. My experience with Cambodian food is limited to the four days I spent in Siem Reap five years ago (which I posted about in this thread, and updated today to add back pictures that became corrupted). Overall, we had some very good food but I found that Cambodian food does not stretch your palate (so to speak) like Thai food, at least when it comes to spice heat. Friends of mine who have traveled Cambodia more extensively confirmed the lack of spice heat compared to Thai food. That's not a criticism -- just noting a difference. After all, we had some fantastic food in Siem Reap.

I'd love to join a group for dinner here--I'm in Oak Brook a couple of days a week now for work so I'd be happy to pick up city people if they want to take a train out and then drive back together.

The coconut-milk variant of the samlar (soup) machu (sour) kreung (lemongrass paste). Andy gave me some searing little peppers and said next time I could get mine with the tendon and fat "where all the flavor is." Apple salad was a knockout. Really heavy fresh garlic in everything including the fried rice reminded me of the Thai "drunk food" menus I enjoyed at Spoon and Sala Bua in previous years, though as pointed out above the herbal and funky flavors are more muted (at least on the standard menu).

Would love to hit a full dinner here sometime (and then I recommend some mukhwas from next door).

Seen just now on facebook:

Angkor Restaurant

Hello, everyone! We're here with some rather sad, abrupt news— due to unforeseen circumstances and complications, our restaurant will be CLOSING its doors after August 14th, 2016. The last days to stop by are Friday, August 12th through Sunday, August 14th.

We've had a great run since January 10th, and we are truly, truly, truly grateful for everything that has come our way. We've met super supportive, loving people; and received awesome reviews, comments, and advice. Most importantly, we've had the joy and pleasure of introducing Khmer cuisine to the Chicagoland area.

Thank you all so much for everything. Stay awesome. Stay beautiful.

Many thanks and love,
Angkor Restaurant

Very unfortunate & sad. My family will miss those khmer dishes we really enjoyed whenever we were there. Best of lucks to the lady cook and her family.

I never did make it out there! Bummed to find out about this.

Pocketcontents, you want to try hard to go there before Angkor closes its door for good since we may not have another Cambodian restaurant in Chicago for a very long time.
Despite lacking some original ingredients such as herbs and vegetables usually used in Cambodia and other SE Asian countries such as Lao & Thailand, the substitute ingredients and tastes are very close and original in best restaurants in Cambodia.

TheYimin wrote:Pocketcontents, you want to try hard to go there before Angkor closes its door for good since we may not have another Cambodian restaurant in Chicago for a very long time.
Despite lacking some original ingredients such as herbs and vegetables usually used in Cambodia and other SE Asian countries such as Lao & Thailand, the substitute ingredients and tastes are very close and original in best restaurants in Cambodia.

It would be sad to go another 11+ years until one pops up! My partner and I were discussing buying a car and a point in the pro column was finally getting to eat here.

Angkor's closing has added a to-do item to my list: record family recipes when I'm home next so I can fumble my way through recreating Khmer dishes.

Maybe Uber would do for you for the time being.

Oh jeez.... how did I miss Angkor! We live in Glen Ellyn and pass this all the time. Sounds like it was our type of place too. Sorry to see it come to an end.