Healthy inspiration
Souper Bowl champ crafts Southeast Asian cuisine her own way, with winning results
The verdict is in: Santa Fe loves Chef Nou Kimnath’s cooking, even though many in the city have probably never heard of her. That’s because Nou (or Chef Nath, as she is called professionally) doesn’t have a restaurant, though for the past four years, Nou’s food was available at her popular Thai night pop-up dinners at Sweetwater Harvest Kitchen, where she quietly built up a cult following.
But the soft-spoken Nou is a four-time winner of The Food Depot’s annual Souper Bowl competition, nabbing best overall and best savory soup for Sweetwater Harvest Kitchen in 2017 and 2016 (and best seafood soup in 2014, when she was just ramping up). This year, she won another best savory soup and best overall soup trophy, under her own name this time, for her chicken tom yum, a distinctively tangy, usually spicy Thai soup.
Nou was born in Cambodia, where she survived the Pol Pot regime, including years of enslavement in a Khmer Rouge work camp. Her ancestry is a mix of Cambodian, Thai and Chinese, but while her food draws on all those cuisines (and more), Nou’s recipes are not old family traditions — quite the opposite. In fact, when she was growing up, Nou was actively discouraged from spending time in the kitchen.
“My mother had four daughters, but she never wanted us to work hard,” Nou says. “After Pol Pot, my mother never wanted me to touch anything in the kitchen. She wanted me to go to school and work as a professional. She wanted us to be independent.”
But Nou had a discerning palate and a natural affinity for food that could not be suppressed.
“Every time my mother cooked for me, I knew in my heart, ‘No, you need to add this or put this,’ but I never said anything,” laughs Nou. “I didn’t want her to be upset.”
Nou’s journey to the kitchen was, therefore, a bit belated. Her culinary instruction eventually came at the hands of an old friend she calls “Auntie,” a woman who she met at the market and who mistook her for her own long-lost daughter, and who had worked as a chef at the Cambodian royal palace before the Khmer Rouge regime. “Auntie” encouraged Nou to learn to cook, but initially, Nou wasn’t interested — she had a career in education.
Then, when Nou got married, she began making frequent trips to Chinese restaurants to pick up food for herself and her husband, Peter Gyallay-Pap, who she met in Cambodia when he was working with Cambodian and Thai refugees. Though she thought herself long-finished with cooking, one day she peeked her head into the kitchen of a friend’s takeout place and realized that the reality of commercial cooking often rendered the food less healthy, with deep-frying replacing steaming and premade ingredients used to keep the line flowing. Nou, who concerns herself with the well-being of the people she feeds, knew she could do better.
“I thought, ‘Oh God, every day I eat junk food,’ ” she recalls. So she took Auntie up on her offer and, dish by dish, learned to tame Southeast Asian cuisine.
Nou’s latest incarnation is as a private chef, under the business name Chef Nath’s Inspired Khmer Cuisine. The word “inspired” is meant to serve as both a description and a caveat that Nou’s food might not be as “authentic” as, for example, a Cambodian or recent traveler might expect. But Nou chooses to make her food the way she does because that’s how she likes it.
The price point for Nou’s food is always higher than people are used to paying for takeout pad thai, but that’s because you’re not getting takeout pad thai, you’re getting fresh home cooking. For Nou, the flavors and dishes she creates are born out of both her love of the flavors of the food she grew up with and a desire to feed people only organic, clean foods that she prepares from scratch, to the point of making every single spice paste from the bottom up.
To amp up the nutritional value or umami factor of a dish, she might use nontraditional ingredients pulled from other cuisines, like Japanese seaweeds, sometimes replacing traditional ingredients that are not always to her taste, like fish sauce.
Nou tends to avoid the very aggressive flavors of tanginess and spiciness that can overpower the fragrant spices in the food, and whenever possible she increases the freshness factor of her dishes, like her Burmese fermented tea leaf salad, which is noticeably more salad-like and less paste-like than the original. Pad thai can be pretty sweet and unhealthy, but Nou uses only cane or coconut sugar to lower the glycemic index and balances the flavors with herbs and spices instead.
Nou feels free to experiment according to her own tastes — because she wasn’t raised as a child to cook, she doesn’t have a lot of prejudices about how a dish “must” be made. Khmer cuisine does not use chilies as much as Thai cuisine and has a more subtle, herbal quality from roots, edible flowers, etc.
Nou’s pop-ups at Sweetwater ended last year after the restaurant launched a full-time dinner menu. Currently, Nou is booked for private dinner parties, which take on the character of sit-down feasts rather than finger-food, catered affairs. Dinners can, for example, begin with a mango pomelo salad in garlic-shallot dressing topped with cashews, or a tangy seafood tom yum soup full of lobster tail, mussels and shrimp scented with galangal, kaffir lime leaves and turmeric. Her curries are all made from curry paste she compounds herself with a mortar and pestle, including Saraman curry (elsewhere called Massaman curry), a yellow Malaysian-inspired dish with a base of curry paste made from pan-roasted spices. Salmon or a whole chicken is marinated in lemon grass paste and, in the case of the salmon, simmered in daikon turmeric sauce.
Private dinners are roughly $75 per person (usually a minimum of six people) and can involve a wine consultation and full service if desired. But for those of us who don’t want to (or can’t) throw a party like that to try Nou’s cuisine, take heart: Nou is seeking out a new spot to revive her pop-ups. And when sitting down to a plate of Nou’s shrimp pad thai, instead of using the word “authentic,” use a synonym that can mean something entirely different: “real.”