PAN-ASIAN POP-UP RIFFS ON THE CLASSICS
CHEF-OWNER SOCHEATH SUN COOKS SOUTHEAST ASIAN CUISINE WITH A NOD TO HER CAMBODIAN ROOTS
When Socheath Sun moved to San Diego from Virginia 12 years ago, she had never worked in restaurants, but she had a strong sense that hospitality was her calling. She loved hosting and entertaining, and dreamed of having parties like her Cambodian parents did, welcoming friends and family into their home.
There was just one problem. “No one wanted me,” Sun recalls. “They were like, ‘You have no experience.’ ”
Unfazed, she kept applying and eventually found a job serving at Blind Lady Ale House in Normal Heights. It was a new neighborhood restaurant at the time, and the community and camaraderie she felt was instant.
From there, she moved to its now-shuttered sister restaurant Tiger Tiger, where she began venturing into cooking. She persuaded head chef Aaron LaMonica to add a pork belly banh mi to the menu, and he, in turn, persuaded her to join his kitchen staff.
It was hard to leave her cushy server job for a harder job that paid less, but it was there she learned wood-fire cooking and French techniques from her mentor, LaMonica, who died in 2016.
“He was like, ‘Soc, I don’t know what it is you do, but anytime you make food, I can tell you pay so much attention and it just comes natural to you. You should really pursue it,’” Sun remembers him saying.
With LaMonica’s help, she had found her calling. After working as an in-house chef for a marketing company and having free rein over the menu and its ingredients, she decided to start her own business in 2019.
Angkorian Pikestaff is a pan-Asian pop-up restaurant that plays on the classics. Once or twice a week, Sun will post a single-dish menu on Instagram. She takes orders for about 24 hours, and patrons pick up their to-go orders a day or so later at a commissary kitchen in downtown San Diego.
The restaurant is named for the warriors of Angkor Wat, the capital city of the Khmer Empire, who defended the land and its people between the ninth and 15th centuries. Their weapon of choice was the pikestaff, a long staff topped with a sharp spike.
As for Sun, her secret weapons are creativity and culinary breadth. She cooks all kinds of Asian cuisine, from Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea and other countries, and caters to both meat eaters and vegans.
It’s not often you see Uyghur-style dapanji chicken stew or vegan Burmese samosa soup on a menu in San Diego, but Sun specializes in highlighting lesser-known Asian foods. Recently, she cooked Macanese pork chop bun sandwiches, Cambodian sour beef sausages, and a vegan “lechon” kawali sisig burrito, her take on a Filipino deep-fried pork dish.
“It’s stuff I grew up eating, things that are super nostalgic for me,” Sun said. “I just kind of make it my own.”
The dishes dazzle on Instagram — golden fried chicken atop a bed of glistening handpulled noodles, jalapeño Spam gravy cascading down a country fried steak loco moco sandwich, vegan fried “fish” tucked into a baguette with pickled vegetables and lemongrass sate.
So far the reception has been great, and she’s hoping to open a restaurant sometime this year. She’s built a kind of cult following on Instagram and gets positive feedback from Southeast Asian elders as well as people who are new to Cambodian cuisine.
And that’s a priority for Sun — making dishes that respect traditions while inviting uninitiated palates.
“I make food a little more palatable, where it’s not straight like punch you in the mouth, or hit you in the gut, but easing you into the flavors of fermented fish paste or shrimp paste or things that are super raw and super pungent,” Sun said.
When not cooking, Sun DJs around town, specializing in Southeast Asian funk and disco. Recently, she played the San Diego Asian Film Festival and an event for AAPI Heritage Month hosted by Teros Gallery and Pixley’s Oddities in University Heights.
Whether working or playing, Sun’s love for her culture is evident.
“This is what I do,” she said. “I love introducing people to cool Asian food and cool Asian music.”
Return to Brewery Rowe
Welcome back to Brewery Rowe, which has been on hiatus since spring 2020. (Sara Butler’s Hop Talk admirably filled this gap, but she’s departed for fresh writing opportunities on the East Coast.)
I’ve only been gone two-plus years. Nothing’s changed, right?
“There are many things that have become large items in our world,” remarked Tomme Arthur, co-founder and chief operating officer at San Marcos’ The Lost Abbey and Port Brewing, in a recent email. “Large items” such as …
More expensive grains, hops, cans and bottles
Soaring gas prices, boosting the cost of shipments
Turmoil among staff, due to the “great resignation” and larger payrolls.
“All told,” he continued, “it’s beyond a dog-eat-dog world out there, and I expect many small breweries will be struggling this year more than ever before.”
Goliath stumbles
The San Diego Brewing Timeline, maintained by historian Judith Downie at Cal State San Marcos, makes grim reading. The most recent entries, 2020 to the
present, show 17 breweries closing.
Torpedoed by COVID, inflation and supply chain woes, most of the casualties were neighborhood favorites. Au revoir, Automatic! See ya, South Park!
Yet something even more remarkable occurred: Big Beer was chased from our market.
10 Barrel, which Anheuser-Busch InBev staked to a spacious two-story East Village brewpub in 2017? Shuttered.
Saint Archer, acquired by MillerCoors in 2015? Closed.
These setbacks followed Constellation Brands’ decision to abandon San Diego’s Ballast Point in 2019. The U.S. distributor of Corona and Modelo, Constellation bought Ballast four years earlier for a cool $1 billion. It sold the brewery to a tiny operation — suburban Chicago’s Kings & Convicts — for an undisclosed sum; informed sources peg the price at less than 10 percent of Constellation’s original investment.
Despite these black eyes for out-oftown corporations, staying local is no guarantee of success. Witness this year’s sale of Green Flash/Alpine Beer, once among the 50 largest craft breweries in the U.S.
Significant challenges loom on the horizon. Modern Times was auctioned off
last Friday — more on that in the next Brewery Rowe — while Stone, the area’s largest brewery, owes investors $464 million.
But we are also seeing signs of renewed growth and optimism.
Coronado Brewing, where production fell from 41,704 barrels of beer in 2019 to 40,125 barrels in ’20, rebounded to 43,830 barrels in ’21.
The pandemic forced AleSmith, one of the area’s oldest surviving breweries, to lay off some staff and temporarily cut the pay of others. Recently, though, it rolled out a new IPA, Party Tricks, and replaced its clunky canning line with a $1.6 million model.
“It’s top of the line,” said Peter Zien, AleSmith’s owner and pay cut recipient. “We’re doing pretty good.”
Hot Tub Time Machine
Dipping into beers and breweries past. July 1933: Balboa Brewing Co. opened on San Diego’s Imperial Avenue. Bismarck pilsner, “The Champagne of Beer,” fueled ales, and Balboa quickly became California’s second-largest brewery.
Balboa, we hardly knew ye: By 1935, it left San Diego for good, resettling in L.A.