Anywhere else I'll eat Sophy's Jerky with your Wagyu steak

Pepper-smeared strips of beef jerky were the basis for countless late-night study sessions in my college dorm. I enjoyed the leathery, stringy belts that I ate as a child on road trips to Las Vegas, Palm Desert, or wherever my parents took us in my mother's cherry red Volvo station wagon. A bag of Trader Joe's turkey jerky fills me up in economy class on long international flights. I'm not a fan of gas station beefsticks.

But in all my decades as a beef jerky connoisseur, I had never had jerky like the one I've had at Sophy's: Cambodian Town Food & Music in Long Beach. And if you don't regularly visit this restaurant on the outskirts of Cambodia, I suspect you probably haven't either.

Chef Sophy Khut's jerky appears on the plate as strong, 15 cm pieces of steak. They have experienced a kind of fleshy glow that requires six hands and two hours of work. Three people take turns working the wet marinade into the flank steak, tossing it every 20 minutes until all the liquid is absorbed.

The beef is dried, vacuum sealed, and then deep fried before serving, creating crispy edges that can be peeled away like string cheese. It tastes like tender beef ribs, the meat soaked in a garlic marinade with strong ginger, black pepper, fish sauce and just a hint of sugar. Silence reigns over the table as people gnaw at their sticks, heads bowed and mouths busy.

They dip the meat in a cloudy sauce laced with vinegar and seasoned with black pepper. Khut uses peppercorns from the Kampot region of Cambodia, prized for their strong flavor and aroma.

I greedily dipped my strips into the spice, eager to get as much on the strands as possible without actually dipping my entire hand into the bowl. Imagine salt and vinegar chips in liquid form. You may want to request one casserole dish per person at your table.

Some of Sophy's menu items are what you'd expect from a Thai pho shop in your neighborhood. Cambodia shares a border and some ingredients and techniques with Vietnam and Thailand. But despite the obvious overlap, Cambodia's cuisine is different, with more funk and less spice than that of its neighbors.

Khut comes from a long line of entrepreneurs who run restaurants and a wedding catering service in Siem Reap province in northwest Cambodia. This area is home to Angkor Wat, the eighth wonder of the world. A beautiful picture of the temple and its jagged sandstone peaks hangs on a wall in the dining room.

Sophy's is a restaurant very similar to my Asian grandmother's house: cluttered but clean, no discernible organization of plants at the (and only) back entrance, several Buddhas and scattered Christmas lights in March.

Khut opened her first restaurant in Oregon after graduating from high school, but was persuaded to move to California by friends who told her about Long Beach's large Cambodian population, the highest concentration outside the country. She took over a small restaurant called Ruth's Country Kitchen on Anaheim Street, where the first wave of Cambodian restaurants in Long Beach gathered.

In the fall of 2000, she changed the menu from eggs and bacon to Cambodian food and renamed the restaurant Sophy's. A few years later, it moved to its current location on Pacific Coast Highway and later changed the name to Sophy's: Cambodia Town Food & Music. She wanted the new name to reflect Long Beach's recent designation as the Cambodia Town Business and Cultural District, making it the first Cambodian city in the United States.

The menu is extensive. I'm talking Cheesecake Factory-long, with numbered dishes reaching into the 100s. Dishes marked “Khmer” are said to be traditional Cambodian, or at least Khut’s version of a recognizable dish.

When there's not too much going on in the kitchen, your husband comes with bowls made from bent banana leaves. If it's busy, you'll get a porcelain bowl. Regardless of the ship, Khut says the steamed fish curry is the most famous dish in Cambodia. She simmers catfish fillets in coconut milk, refined with lemongrass, galangal, fingerroot, makrut lime fruits and their leaves. The curry is thickened with so much egg that it creates a quivering custard that surrenders at the slightest touch of your spoon.

Spicy is not a powerful word to accurately describe the shock that comes with the Beef Tuk Prahok. The light brown sauce, intended as a dip for the steak, is packed with the spicy flavor of fermented fish, a staple ingredient in Cambodian cuisine. It's mixed with an ounce of shallots, grilled garlic and lemongrass, but its severity remains unchanging. The raw slices of eggplant, cabbage, and green beans presented with the dip temper, if only slightly, the violent lightning that hits your tongue. This stuff will make your eyes water and keep you coming back for more.

Tuk Kreoung Khmer is a Tamer dish made from boiled, fermented fish and grilled fish. It's muddy and wonderfully sour, with hints of fresh herbs and grilled pieces of fish in the bowl. Like the Beef Tuk Prahok, it is served with various raw vegetables. It also tastes good over white rice.

Fermented fish is the not-so-discreet supporting character in Somlaw Machu Kreoung, giving the bright green soup a fishy backbone. A paste of lemongrass, garlic, galangal, makrut lime, turmeric and tamarind makes a potent elixir that Khut says is said to cure a cold or flu. If you order the soup with beef or pork, be prepared for any moisture to leach into the broth, so the pieces serve primarily as a side dish.

Like all soups at the restaurant, it is served bubbling in a silver vat with a leaping flame heating the vessel in the center.

The Tom Kha, a coconut curry soup you'll find in most Thai restaurants, is clearly better here than any other version in recent memory. Each spoonful transitions from sour to sweet and then spicy, creating a special fusion of flavors that is both familiar and intoxicating.

If you're craving noodles, avoid the Chah Mi Katahng. The thick sauce drowns out any carbon monoxide on the fatty rice noodles and coats the vegetables with its chewy consistency. I prefer the Phnom Penh noodles, which I ordered dry. The thin rice noodles are chewy and smooth with what tastes like garlic oil mixed in a bowl with pork to the fourth power (ground, sliced, patties and meatballs), along with shrimp and plenty of cilantro and bean sprouts. The dry version comes with a fortifying bowl of chicken and pork bone broth that tastes like roasted garlic.

Sip, sip and repeat.

The Beef Lok Lak is almost unrecognizable on the plates of some other Cambodian restaurants in the area, where the beef is cut into pieces and served with a small heap of salt and pepper and a few slices of lemon or lime on a plate. Khut's interpretation consists of tender flank steak shavings, which she prepares with a secret house sauce flavored with chicken broth, ginger and garlic. A pinch of cornstarch ensures that the sauce sticks to the meat like a glaze. It is served alongside a dipping sauce made from lime and freshly ground Kampot peppercorns. With a pile of fresh lettuce underneath you can eat it like a salad.

The black peppered frog legs are the preferred crispy accompaniment to an ice-cold bottle of Angkor lager. They're lightly breaded, tender like chicken thighs, and flavorful with black pepper, garlic, and jalapeño.

Dessert is fried banana or mango with sticky rice, but focus on the dishes not on the menu on a small counter at the front of the dining room. The rows of desserts wrapped in banana leaves sit next to bags of Kampot peppercorns for sale, cylinders of rice flour cookies and Ziploc bags full of steamed peanuts.

Most of what Khut offers are sticky rice cakes wrapped around a fruit filling.

The Nom Kum is the only rice cake that is shaped like a triangle. The rice cake is so sticky that it is difficult to remove it from the packaging or with a fork. Inside is a sandy, sweet mix of coconut flakes, palm sugar and sesame seeds.

On a busy weekend, it's not unusual to see a child grabbing a nom kum, or banana-filled rice cake dessert, to bring to the table.

There is a sense of ownership among the families that come together and the children who run around the restaurant as if it were their living room. The front area is lined with booths that stand about two feet from either wall, forming two narrow hallways that run the length of the room. On a recent visit, children ran up and down in the gaps between tables.

In fact, in many ways, Sophy's is a place that feels like it belongs to its community: music posters advertising upcoming concerts hang on the walls, and a large picture of a local theater with the words “Cambodian Film Festival” glows on the marquee. . Although music is in the name, Khut says most of the music in the back banquet room happens at private parties or when Dengue Fever, an American band that sings Cambodian rock music, comes to town.

Depending on what you order and when you eat, every visit to Sophy's can feel like you're experiencing a whole new restaurant. But it doesn't matter what time it is or who is sitting across the table from you. Just remember one thing: order the beef jerky.