Long Beach chef Chad Phuong’s life sometimes feels like a triptych, three independent panels in time that collectively portray a full scene. There is Cambodia, the place of his birth, where he bore witness to genocide before escaping with his mother. There is Long Beach, where he arrived as a refugee and found a whole new life. And there are the grazing fields of Hereford, Texas, considered one of the nation’s centers of beef production.
Phuong has long sought deeper connections with his Cambodian ancestors. He knows, for example, that his family comes from a food background, particularly farming. His grandfather ran a small agricultural operation in Cambodia, right where the Mekong River floods the plains to produce some of the world’s best rice. Phuong looked up to his grandfather immensely, a man capable of not only cooking but growing his own food, and those early memories remain indelibly ingrained in him.
It wasn’t until the pandemic, when Phuong lost his job at a surgery center in Irvine and took up hardcore backyard smoking on a friend’s old unused system, that food became about more than just community. Within months, the untrained cook had gone from a weekly cord of red oak wood and a rusty grill to a once-a-week setup at Kim Sun Kitchen’s parking lot in North Long Beach.
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