Angkor: Cambodian for Beginners

Angkor is a Cambodian restaurant you don’t need a crib sheet to eat in.

It is about the gentlest place you can imagine. Walk in with your own bottle of wine, ask if the management minds, and you get a smile and the following response: “We would like you to have whatever would please you.”

And it is very hard not to be pleased here. Is the food completely authentic? Probably not. I sense that it has been tamed for the American palate. It is, however, completely delicious. The flavors are as gentle as the atmosphere, every sharp accent kissed with coconut, every sweet balanced by sour.

The same flavors appear again and again: pork and prawns are a common combination, as in the shredded green papaya salad with pork and prawns in a light lime sauce. Lime is another recurring theme: you find it, for instance, on the appealingly simple baked eggplant. And coconut weaves its way through the menu in a particularly appealing way. A fabulous soup of chicken, pineapple and red curry is stirred into a coconut broth. Even better, however, is the chunks of boneless chicken mixed with vegetables and curry and steamed in a whole young coconut.

The food rarely has much real bite; when the menu says spicy, it only means sort of spicy. The food here is as gentle as the atmosphere, and when you put them together it makes you very glad that there is at least one Cambodian restaurant outside of Long Beach.

Angkor, 16161 Ventura Blvd., Encino. (818) 990-8491. Open for lunch Monday-Saturday 11 a.m.-3 p.m.; for dinner nightly 5-10 p.m.