The Secret of the Junkpile

Cheng Heng Restaurant
448 University Ave. W., St. Paul; 222-5577

Just as the pirate always has a green parrot on his shoulder, just as the Headless Horseman always has a jack-o'-lantern in his free hand, so I, too, have an ever-present companion and leitmotif--the pile of papers at the side of my desk. Oh, you should see it. Things I don't want to deal with but can't throw away; story ideas, half-finished manuscripts, unanswered correspondence, coupons for mini-golf. It's like a scruffy little ghost that rises and falls in direct relation to how on top of things I am. At times it gets downright frightening, threatening to bury me and all my ambitions under its crashing, papery weight. Sometimes I think that when I die, they'll bury me with it, like Wyatt Earp and his six-shooters.

Anyhoo, I was trying to beat that scruffy ghost into submission the other day and I came, again, upon a letter a reader sent me about a little Cambodian restaurant up on University, a letter I have read at least half a dozen times and which invariably causes me vast seconds of unease before I bury it once more. I was on the verge of again re-interring it when I finally paused to think: Why on earth does a letter about a restaurant cause me such distress? Because I don't know beans about Cambodian food, and for me the very word Cambodia conjures up deeply disturbing associations: Pol Pot, the Killing Fields, civil war. Of course that is patently, preposterously unfair. It's not like I pause on the doorsteps of French restaurants and muse: Robespierre, The Reign of Terror, "Off with their heads!" On this realization I raced over to Cheng Heng, and found a small, immaculately clean family restaurant run by husband-and-wife team Kunrath and Kevin Lam, a peach of a place where one can eat pretty darn well, for cheap. After a series of visits to the bright, friendly spot I developed a great fondness for a number of the Cambodian dishes, like my new A-1 absolute favorite beef salad, plear, ($5.75.)

Plear is a lime-infused combination of thinly sliced seared beef, wafer-thin pieces of celery and radishes, crunchy, just-sprouted beans, and red and green bell peppers, all unified by a sauce of chili pepper and lemongrass, and finally brightened by handfuls of whole-leaf herbs like basil, lemon basil, and mint. It's as bright and lively a flavor combination as you can get on one plate, and since it's served with a plate of rice, it also makes a fulfilling meal. Cheng Heng's spring rolls ($2.50 for two) are some of the best in town, made to order and filled with the scads of herbs I've come to know as the Lams' trademark. They are served with generous cups of that rice-vinegar/carrot/chopped peanut dressing other places ladle out by the thimbleful. Papaya salad ($3.50) is a tasty, punchy combination of crisp, shredded green papaya, tomatoes, and a spicy chili sauce. Loth noodles--quarter-inch-thick translucent squares of rice dough--are a new favorite of mine, since they make a harmonious, savory cross between lo mein and chow fun. For lo mein they are seared at high heat and combined in a mild sauce with carrots, celery, and your choice of pork, beef, or shrimp ($5.25.) Chha mussels ($7.25) are an abundant portion of green-lip mussels served with scallions in something similar to a black-bean sauce.

My groups ended up ordering most of what we chose from the picture menu/photo album you can request along with the regular menu, and our biggest wild card by this method was probably the chha kroeng beef, ($5.69) a dish that looked merely dark and plain in the picture, but turned out to consist of crisp slices of beef in a piquant lemongrass sauce, topped with a nice textural contrast of chopped peanuts and firm seared green-pepper chunks.

Not all Cheng Heng's dishes have thus impressed me. The curry noodle soup (quob poob, $4.85 for a large bowl) I tried was a very, very sweet coconut-milk curry far too heavy for my palate. The banh hoy ($4.95) appeared to be merely a different arrangement of the spring-roll ingredients--shrimp, herbs, pork, steamed rice noodles, often cucumber--with lettuce leaves for a wrap. Cheng Heng's menu also offers a page of standard American-Chinese dishes that I didn't venture into, in part because I tend to think that life is too short to eat moo goo gai pan ($6.25), and in part because the big plate of pork fried rice ($4.95) I ordered one night was distinctly unspectacular. (Vegetarians, please note that the Cambodian vegetarian dishes are hidden away at the very end of the menu, after all the Chinese dishes.)