Angkor Restaurant doesn't look much like a palace. Nestled in a colonial-style house with a wrought-iron fire escape snaking up its facade, the restaurant modestly promises "authentic Cambodian cuisine" on a practical blue-paneled sign.
The inside is a bit more ornamental - wooden Buddhist sculptures adorn the yellowish walls alongside an authentic print of the restaurant's namesake temple - but the chairs are not thrones and the silverware is really ironware, just like everywhere else.
Close your eyes when the spicy Nam Yaa soup arrives, though, and you just might feel like royalty.
That's because Angkor's chef, 57-year-old Bopha Kem-Ban, is the niece of one of Cambodia's royal cooks from the days before the Khmer Rouge took over the country and killed more than seven million of its citizens.
As millions of Cambodians fled the oppressive communist regime in the late 1970s, Bopha scribbled down her aunt's recipes before traveling halfway across the world to Rhode Island.
Now, the young Wickenden Street eatery serves up food fit for a king at prices more befitting a peasant.
Leaving royalty for Rhody
Chutama Am, the restaurant's owner, escaped Cambodia in 1976 after losing his mother and seven siblings to the infamous "killing fields" of the countryside. He was sponsored by the United States and placed in Rhode Island as part of a commitment later codified as the Refugee Act of 1980.
Raised by his English teacher, Am eventually married Bopha's daughter in 1994 and eagerly welcomed his mother-in-law - who made it to America in 1980 - into his blossoming family, which now includes four children.
Liam Kelley, associate professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Hawaii, says very few people escaped the Khmer Rouge, a radical Communist faction trained by the Vietnamese, during the years it was in power, from 1975 to 1979.
Led by the dictator Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge sought to rebuild Cambodian society from the ground up and loosen its ties to foreign countries by producing everything domestically. City-dwellers were forced to work on farms, which Kelley says the Khmer Rouge saw as "the backbone of their economy."
"They wanted to wipe the slate clean and start from the beginning," Kelley says. Though the term "killing fields" usually refers to open areas where the Khmer Rouge executed Cambodians en masse, Kelley says it can also refer to these farms, where inexperienced city people couldn't sustain themselves.
"The majority of people were killed simply by neglect," he says. "They died from starvation and sickness."
Kelley says it would have been especially difficult for Bopha and her family to survive, because the Khmer Rouge wished to sever all ties with the old regime.
"They would have been the number one target for the Khmer Rouge," he says. "They tried to wipe out everyone connected with the elite."
Bopha's aunt left the royal palace - where she cooked for the King Norodom Sihanouk's sister-in-law - in the 1960s to live with Bopha and her mother in the city of Battambang. As the danger in Cambodia escalated, Bopha hurried to leave her country in 1980 - but not before copying down her aunt's royal recipes.
Sharing tradition
Am says he has felt a special connection with Bopha ever since his marriage to her daughter. Growing up in an American home, he had never tried food from his native country until he sampled his mother-in-law's cooking.
Among Bopha's specialties are Natang - ground pork with a tomato base and some coconut milk served on rice crackers - and Mitapheap, a rice dish with pickled vegetables and a "secret sauce."
"Once I was introduced to my country's foods, I was like 'Wow, this is amazing,'" Am says. "I knew I had to show her to the world and let her relive her aunt's legend."
Am opened and later closed Angkor restaurants in Cranston in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Demand for the food was there, he says, but he had some trouble with the execution.
"We had a good review back in May 2002 in the Providence Journal," he says. "After that, we had a three-hour waiting list with only one chef."
But Am noticed something peculiar about his clientele. "90 percent of our customers were from the academic community," he says.
The realization prompted Am to move his business to Providence, closer to College Hill. The Wickenden location, which opened last November, has quickly become known for its food and hospitality.
Am says his clientele is still budding, but most of his customers are regulars. One of his favorites, he says, is Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Speech and Dance Barbara Tannenbaum, who often comes with her husband, Cliff.
"Barbara comes here every week," Am says. Seconds after the words leave his mouth, he hears the restaurant door open and looks over his shoulder. Standing at the door are the Tannenbaums.
"Watch this - she's going to order the Cambodian salad," he whispers with a wink.
Less than 10 minutes later, Barbara is enjoying her salad with a glass of wine.
"We came here the first week they opened," she says. "We brought a bottle of wine and they didn't have corkscrews, so we went out and bought a corkscrew and left it with them so they'd have one. That's how our friendship started."
The Tannenbaums say Am shared his story with them from the very beginning.
"Anytime someone is so connected with their roots and they want to relive the past like that, that's cool," Cliff says. "That's one of the reasons we keep coming back. That and the Nam Yaa soup - it's addictive."
The Nam Yaa - or medicine - soup is a spicy yellow broth with chicken, shrimp, scallions and lime leaves in it - "what they ate in the royal palace," Am says. One spoonful is enough to tell that the dish is unlike regular Asian fusion fare. Its earthy spice is warm, powerful and hard to pin down - "that's because we use a secret blend of five herbs," Am says.
'Food from a golden age'
For Am, the restaurant is as much about good service and food as it is about connecting with his heritage through Bopha, whose culinary talents were squandered during her 15 years working at a textile factory in Warwick.
"She deserves more than working in a factory," he says. "Having her here, it's like reliving the legend of our past culture."
Though Bopha doesn't know English very well, she reads and writes Cambodian - "most Cambodians can't say that because the Khmer Rouge basically wiped out the upper and middle classes," Am says.
He also says it would be a shame to waste the recipes, which represent the height of Cambodian cuisine.
"When you escape the killing fields, you're not thinking about anything else but surviving," he says. "But my mother-in-law, she was so into the cooking that she said, 'I have to keep these recipes.'"
Kelley says the period during which Bopha's aunt cooked for the palace was a "vibrant time" for Cambodians, which is why expatriates like Am are so intent on recovering whatever they can from it.
"There is a strong nostalgia for what the Khmer Rouge destroyed," Kelley says. "They're proud of the food, but they're also proud that this is food from a golden age which was ruined."
The 1960s saw a boom in architecture and music, Kelley says, and Cambodia even held an Olympics-style sporting event for neutral countries during the Cold War.
"If you were a well-off person in the capital, life was really great," Kelley says. "If you had compared it to Taiwan and South Korea, you wouldn't have guessed that one would go down the tubes and the others would thrive."
This connection to a lost cultural past means Am and Bopha are especially faithful to the original recipes. Am recounts his favorite story of Bopha's: a trip by King Sihanouk to America to visit Cambodian communities here.
When he stopped in Rhode Island, Sihanouk tried some of Bopha's cooking and said that it tasted familiar to him.
"Bopha was so happy," Am says. "She said, 'That's because my family cooked for you over 20 years ago!'"
