Unless your mom is Cambodian, it seems like every time there’s an opportunity to eat Khmer food in Chicago, it’s the only opportunity. The first time I wrote about it, way back in 2008, there were no restaurants serving it, but twice a year, with a sincere offering to the monks of Uptown’s Watt Khmer Metta on Cambodian New Year, or Ancestors’ Day, you could join in a post-ceremonial feast of outstanding food made by a lot of moms.
One afternoon last week a masked Lim showed up at my door like the ninja Kakashi Hatake, bearing a prototype meal kit containing the congee, mee kula, and a salad of sweet, delicate head-on grilled shrimp, crushed peanuts, herbs, cucumbers, and fried shallots. The centerpiece tek prahok sach ko was a nod to French Indochina that Lim calls “Cambodian steak frites,” a perfectly rare sliced ribeye, with a bag of Lim’s crackly battered fries, the ideally durable spud variant to survive the length of a delivery order. These are to be dunked in a deadly rich garlic aioli balanced by a little tub of powerful tek prahok for the steak; a dipping sauce of kroeung, roasted fish paste, and lime juice, incorporated with green Thai eggplants, and “all the herbs you can imagine.”
4356 W. Armitage 872-802-4920hermosarestaurant.com
