Walking Fish and Other Adventures

Cambodian nightclubs can be about as exotic as nightlife gets, conga lines snaking between tables to something that sounds like a Madonna record played backwards, perfectly synchronized couples executing what looks like a cross between Khmer classical dance and the Electric Slide. All the elements of American disco are there, from mirrored balls to tight minidresses, but re-arranged in a way that has been known to make novices dizzy. And the food’s usually pretty good.

Banteay Srey Village, a small restaurant on the western edge of Long Beach’s Little Phnom Penh neighborhood, is more the Cambodian equivalent of an old-fashioned piano bar than a disco, but the effect is just as unworldly. The young woman who sings here late on weekend nights, Molina Heang, trills complicated pentatonic ornaments with coloratura ease above the cheesy organ accompaniment. (The closest reference point might be those eerie torch songs Julee Cruise sings at the Twin Peaks roadhouse.)

The audience chain-smokes, swigs the house refreshment--Heineken served over ice--and nibbles Cambodian bar snacks: grilled skewers of marinated beef; dried shrimp with cabbage pickle; warm beef jerky; house-cured anchovies; tiny fried fish that you pick up with your fingers, wrap with slivers of ginger and paper-thin slices of lime and dip into a dish of salty fish sauce thick with floating bits of raw garlic and tiny, searing bird chiles. Delicious!

Though there are dozens of Cambodian restaurants within a few blocks of here, nearly all of them are Chinese places that also offer a few Cambodian dishes. Some of them don’t bother to translate those Cambodian dishes out of Khmer script. Apparently, there was never much of a native restaurant culture in Cambodia: When Cambodians dined out, they went to French and Chinese restaurants.

Banteay Srey Village is the most Cambodian of Long Beach’s restaurants, with cassettes for sale, thatch decor, and waitresses in long Cambodian-style dresses. The menu, all translated, is 100% Cambodian too.

“ Sadao salad,” the waitress says, screwing up her eyes as if to indicate the intensity of her thought, “is . . . is made with . . . the green stuff from inside of the fish.”

“Uh, I think we’ll pass on that one,” my friend says.

“Oh good,” the waitress says. “I don’t really care for that one myself. Maybe you’d like to try the frog.”

What we ended up with was a beef salad punchy with lime, dusted with ground peanuts, flavored with unfamiliar herbs and spiked with a bracing dose of chile. It was a spectacular dish, related to dishes we’d had in Thai and Vietnamese restaurants but somehow juicier, lighter, fresher in taste. There was anchovy dip--a little bowl of pork-based coconut curry vibrating with the salty pungency of the fish--that we scooped up with chunks of cucumber and bitterish slices of raw, golfball-size Cambodian eggplant. There was a giant bowl of hot and sour soup, bubbling over a Sterno inferno, that was delicately flavored with clumps of fish roe. There was an anchovy-flavored fondue, in which we briefly cooked slices of squid, beef and shrimp, then rolled the meat in lettuce leaves with raw vegetables and herbs. There was a big plate of sauteed . . . well, frog . . . which was tender, sweet, deliciously spiced with garlic and lemongrass--a damn fine frog.

If you’re a fan, you can get other frog dishes: frog curry; grilled frog; and a spicy-sour soup combining frog with candy-pink banana blossoms that have the texture of hearts of palm. In a soup, frog tastes a little like catfish. (Made with chicken or beef, these dishes are pretty good too, though they may lack the essential amphibian character of the originals.)

And then there’s the walking fish. In “The Encyclopedia of Fish,” A.J. McClane describes it as a creature that can breathe air, migrate over land and thrive in brackish water. “Edible, but difficult to remove the thin, foul-smelling skin,” he advises. At Banteay Srey, this exotic animal is served deep-fried, two jumbo fish to an order, with a side dish of cool, pickled cabbage heart. It’s actually quite tasty, crisp-skinned, golden and mild, but shot throughout with tiny, needle-sharp bones that are next-to-impossible to see. Walking fish isn’t just an entree, it’s an adventure.

Cambodian dessert is kind of an adventure too, whether it’s a serving of the famously odiferous fruit called durian; a sweet tapioca soup that’s dusted with toasted, highly salted coconut; or a thickened egg-yolk dumpling that holds a dollop of sweet beans.

Banteay Srey Village, 1020 Anaheim Blvd., Long Beach, (213) 495-4140. Open daily 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday-Saturday to midnight. Cash only. Takeout. Beer and wine. Guarded lot parking. Dinner for two, food only, $15-$30.