Nite Life

2019 F&W Best New Chef Nite Yun continues to bring Cambodian cuisine center stage.

- Andee Gosnell

IT’S BEEN SIX YEARS since Nite Yun became a 2019 F&W Best New Chef, and she’s still stunned. At the time of the award, Yun was running Nyum Bai, her Cambodian (also known as Khmer) restaurant in Oakland, California. “I was completely shocked because I was just hustling, trying to maintain a business, learning, and making mistakes in the kitchen,” she says. “To be named a Best New Chef was just so wild.”

Yun’s cooking pays homage to her heritage and her mother, who fled the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the late 1970s. Yun was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, and when she was two years old, her family immigrated to the U.S., settling in Stockton, California. Throughout Yun’s childhood, her mother continued to cook Khmer food, like Cambodian-style omelets with sa-om, a fragrant, prickly shrub (recipe opposite). “Every time I think about that dish, it reminds me of home,” she says.

While she’s now planted roots in the Bay Area, her annual trips back to Cambodia continue to inspire her. “When I’m in Cambodia, [I feel like] one of the locals,” she says. “I can just go to the market, buy produce, and take it back to my aunt’s house and cook. It continually reminds me that Cambodian cuisine is so delicious, and I want more and more people to experience it.”