Curiously tucked away in Kingston, Ontario, are the Cambodian kitchens of your dreams. Jessica Duffin Wolfe digs in
Kingston, a university town otherwise known for farmers’ markets and limestone courtyards, doesn’t have a large Cambodian community. Fewer than 200 of Kingston’s roughly 130,000 people identify as Cambodian, according to the latest census.
Toronto’s Khmer Thai was founded and is still owned by Sarann and Jade Chhouk, who traded renovation work for eight months of live-in training with the Vann family. Matt Allen, who runs a culinary business called Aragon Rd Food & Stuff and is a chef at Chez Piggy, Kingston’s most celebrated restaurant, remembers when he first tasted Pat’s food as a child. It was shortly after Pat’s original place, the Wok-In, opened in the early nineties.
Pat himself is a slight figure in his late 60s, with hands that seem too large for his little frame because of joints swollen by years of work. His smile is intent, his words few and his laugh quick. After working in Chinese restaurants for a few years, in 1991 Pat opened the Wok-In, a tiny restaurant just off the main drag. Over the next 10 years he opened and sold four more places in the downtown core: Cambodian Village, Phnom Penh, a restaurant that is now called Royal Angkor, and Cambodiana. All five are still open alongside Pat’s, a testament to the appeal of his recipes.
Pat laughs and shakes his head when asked why he opened and sold so many places, building up his competition. For him, the story is simple. “I liked training them,” he says. “Everybody is happy.” For a while in the mid-aughts, Pat had no restaurant. His older two sons had moved away, and his youngest didn’t want to work in the business. But he decided it was time to start cooking again in 2008 when he learned he was becoming a grandfather.
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