Angkor, Angkor

Angkor restaurant is about as close to Asia as you can get without actually swimming to Cambodia. It’s in Little Phnom Penh, that stretch of Anaheim Street in Long Beach that abounds with business signs written in the Khmer alphabet.

One Sunday evening, I was seated a few steps from the restaurant’s stage area, constructed under an ornamental roof that’s eerily similar to ones that top Buddhist temples throughout Indochina. Suddenly, the vast dining room darkened and fwoomp--floodlights built into the foot of the stage abruptly came up, casting red, green and amber shadows around the room.

A moment later, a male singer dressed like Bobby Vee broke into Khmer song, accompanied by electric guitar, drums and sing-along from a good percentage of the audience. Cultural encounters like this are commonplace in Little Phnom Penh.

At one time, Anaheim Street was a hotbed of gang activity, and the splashiest restaurant on the street, New Paradise, still has a guarded parking lot. Come by Angkor when the restaurant is hosting a wedding party and you might see a security guard patrolling the lot, but the guard is usually not there on other occasions. Anaheim Street is still nowhere near genteel, but it’s quiet most evenings.

Angkor has a trick entrance. The only access is an elevator with a green door that looks as if it had been spray-painted by Earl Scheib. The door is essentially invisible from the street, hidden by a cement shaft directly in front of the door to a coin-operated laundry.

But if you do find the elevator and take it upstairs, you’ll find a Khmer-speaking clientele busy eating Cambodian and Chinese dishes. The menu also makes the occasional culinary foray into Thailand, Vietnam and even, if you’re willing to count frog legs braised in butter and garlic, France.

Unlike some restaurants on this street, Angkor is user-friendly. Non-Cambodians are welcomed and handed a bilingual menu on which the names of all but 18 of the 141 entries are translated into English. But give yourself a gold star if you’ve guessed that those 18 are the most exotic and authentically Cambodian dishes here.

Take amok (No. 131 on the menu), probably Cambodia’s best-known dish. It’s catfish with coconut milk and herbs wrapped inside a large banana leaf and steamed until the fish turns bright orange and takes on an almost custard-like consistency. It’s a deliciously aromatic dish with the richness of a blancmange, and it’s the only untranslated dish on the menu that the waitresses won’t automatically try to talk you out of ordering.

More controversial is No. 122, tak kreung. My waitress described it diplomatically as barbecued fish, but tak kreung is really fermented catfish and minced pork paste, served lukewarm. On the side comes a platter of Thai eggplant, cabbage leaves, green beans and cucumbers, along with a few unusual varieties of lime. You don’t spoon the stuff into your mouth; you dip the vegetables in it the way you’d dip them in garlicky mayonnaise for a grande aioli in Provence. But to say that this is anything but an acquired taste would be kidding.

Cambodian food resembles the other Southeast Asian cuisines, but it’s less spicy than Thai, more finished than Vietnamese. For example, No. 133, trey khao, is deep bronze chunks of sweet braised catfish, glistening inside a covered clay dish. Plea bang ker, No. 119, is an aromatic pile of mint, basil and greens, laced with shrimp, bean sprouts and crushed peanuts.

This cuisine tends to be intensely aromatic, fond of ingredients such as banana blossoms, tamarind and powerfully flavored citrus fruits. Sam law m-chew, No. 123, makes a powerful case for the Cambodian style. Imagine a super-aromatic pork soup in a clay pot filled with meat, mustard greens, lemon grass and lime juice. For me, this is the most memorable item on the untranslated part of Angkor’s menu, even if half a bowl is the limit of any reasonable person.

So much for the mysterious 18. The translated menu is full of excellent dishes in their own right. Look to the families at nearby tables, and it’s a safe bet you will see Chinese-inspired items like salt and pepper baked crab, crispy noodles with various toppings and many stir-fried meats and seafoods, as well as Thai-style sweet and sour shrimp soup, Vietnamese chicken with satay sauce and the scary-sounding deep-fried pig intestine, a crunchy interpretation of this pan-Asian treat sprinkled with spiced salt.

Back outside after this virtual trip across the South China Sea, the air feels light, as light as a moonless spring night in Indochina.

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WHERE TO GO

Angkor Restaurant, 1360 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach; (310) 591-6068. Open for lunch and dinner daily. All major cards. Takeout. Beer and wine. Parking lot. Dinner for two, $16-$26.

WHAT TO GET

Amok, trey khao, tak kreung, sam law m-chew.