For chef Chinchakriya Un, food is a medium for preserving memories of Cambodia, its history, its culture, and its flavor. For a collaboration with New Inc.’s Creative Science Dinner, she brought it all to the table, as she shares with the organization's director Salome Asega.
The way Chinchakriya Un sees it, the matter of honoring her heritage is a higher-stakes pursuit than for most, with the potential impact reaching far beyond her family unit. She was born in a refugee camp in Cambodia, her path directly shaped from birth by the longterm fallout of the genocide that wiped out roughly a quarter of the country’s population in the late 1970s. When she was 1, hers was among the families who made it to the United States, settling in Massachusetts. Now, rather than simply preserving the memories of her household, the 37-year-old is acutely aware how her practice, rooted in traditional Cambodian cuisine, shoulders the weight of an entire culture, at once representing the diaspora of Cambodian immigrants in the United States as well as as carrying the torch as a descendant of those who survived. Going back to Cambodia for the first time in 2015, Un found herself profoundly moved as she learned of the destruction of her forebears’ culture firsthand. She returned to New York, where she is still based today, changed woman, and launched her pop-up series Kreung the following year. Though she spearheads the business, it’s very much a family affair, with her parents and relatives contributing to the knowledge-base of recipes as well as personally cultivating key ingredients from scratch—such as in the herb garden her mother maintains back in Massachusetts. (Un is currently also hard at work preparing to open her first stationary restaurant, Bong, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.)
Un’s latest endeavor in service of this greater good was at New Inc.’s Creative Science Dinner this year, which brought together the community working within the New Museum-associated incubator’s “creative science” track. Now in its fourth year, the dinner was held at NOoSPHERE Arts, a Greenpoint performing arts center located in a building formerly owned by ExxonMobil, also marking the site of an oil spill in the late 1970s that bled into the adjacent Newton Creek and ultimately affected 52 acres of surrounding land and waterways. Today, the site is situated within the vicinity of a wastewater treatment plant, an e-waste recycling site, and a general recycling facility—nexuses of infrastructure both crucial for sustaining city living yet fundamentally disparate from what’s left of the natural setting. In the lead-up to the occasion, Salome Asega, New Inc.’s director connected with Un to talk about her individual approach to cooking, her cultural history as measured in fermentation and flavors, and whether or not she considers herself an artist.
Salome Asega: When I joined New Inc. as a director in 2021, we had been running a track called Creative Science for two years and had a strong partnership with the [science and math research nonprofit] Simons Foundation. I kept hearing from the artists and practitioners in the program that there weren’t too many spaces in New York for artists who are experimenting with modes of science to gather, convene, and learn from each other. So I was like, What if we brought people together and started to make it feel like more of a community? That brings us to your year, the fourth year.
Chinchakriya Un: I do have a theme!
SA: How did the venue this year, NOoSPHERE Arts, influence the food you're making?
CU: It's very exciting for me to honor my culture, honor my Cambodian roots, first and foremost. I’ve spent so much time learning about land through my family. Even when we think about growing herbs and harvesting herbs, I'm jumping in that car, and I'm going to harvest those herbs I grew in South Carolina last season to bring back up here. It does feel regenerative in the way that my culture needs a lot of attention right now to rehabilitate the cultural aspects that were destroyed during the genocide. We’ve also produced so many ferments this past year with our family. I don’t know if these ingredients are even produced in other restaurant settings, so we’re super proud of it. We go to Lowell, Massachusetts to pick up fermented salmon bellies, papaya, and shrimp that have been fermenting for the past year.
I think the conversation around nature, and my own migration story, has to do with utilizing what’s around us. My general philosophy around food now is: Yes, I’m a cook in New York City, and I go to the farmer’s market. I’ll take the occasional trip upstate to forage for mushrooms and visit my friends’ farms. I have an awareness of what’s growing and what’s available, but I most certainly don’t know that I can rely on those resources as a way to continue the legacy of my culture as food.
SA: Listening to you talk, I’m thinking about the theme of recycling and regeneration and how these are strategies for healing. I’d love to hear you talk about how that concept applies in your own practice.
CU: There's a practice of being a chef where you're like, I'm aware of these conditions of the environment. I don't want to put my money in these places that are destructive to the world. Let's figure out a way to source with the most amount of care. And then there are lineages. The ferments, to me, represent generations. I take this trip. I drive. I lean on my mom; I lean on my elders who have this wisdom and this knowledge of how to produce these things. The things they’re using, sometimes they’re waste products, like the salmon belly. So we just ferment it and save it for our minced lemongrass, galangal, lime, chili omelet… that we’re going to make! We’re going to make one dish with fermented salmon belly that gets minced with lemongrass, turmeric on top. All of those herbs have also come from my family’s garden. That to me, makes sense for how I think about food. It’s not as poetic. I’m using the salmon belly; it’s a ferment that exists in my culture. It’s this product that we don’t want to waste, necessarily. And here we are, reusing it and reconstituting it.
SA: But I feel like that’s the most poetic! To take what you’ve called scraps or waste, and now it’s going to nourish 100 people on Saturday.
CU: Honestly, when I was making this menu, I was like, Can I make a menu that feels more fun? And honestly, this feels really fun! And I’m really proud to share this menu. But it is very serious [in that] it draws on a lot of realities of our culture that I don’t often need to say out loud—but I think that I get to do it by cooking this food and sharing these ferments that have carried the survival of our people for so many years.
SA: You have a history of working with arts organizations and artists, and I’d love to hear about that.
CU: I’m so happy every time y’all invite me to do something, because I do feel like it really allows me to think about it. Before, I used to think of it just like, This is part of my culture, and I never considered it to be like an art. I was just like, This is what we eat, what we cook. Now I’m doing all these things to preserve this thing, and now I’m documenting all these ways of producing the thing. And it becomes an obsession, and it becomes a space where other people are like, “Hey, can you invite me in and share this information?” And I’m like Ok, I actually should figure out how to share this information, because there’s a scarcity of it.
Working with arts organizations is a way to see how far I can push myself and create and help evolve this food culture. But also, it’s a way to document it so we can share it and have it. And it does feel like a very sensitive history to me. During the [Cambodian Communist regime] Khmer Rouge, they burned all of our books and they killed all of our artists. So the way that my parents engage with art is also very nonchalant, where they all make music and dance and sing and write, and nobody talks about how creative they are. I’m like, “But wait! We must document this! So it doesn’t go away!”
SA: What drew me to you as a chef was your presentation. You not only make food that is yummy, but it’s presented in a way that is participatory and inviting. How do you create spaces for people to enjoy your food?
CU: I always go back to feeling really excited to eat family style. All. The. Time. And family style in a way that, I understand why it’s practical to serve a roasted chicken and cut it up for people. But in my ideal world, I’m like, “Babe, I’m going to serve you this whole chicken, and you’re just going to figure out how to separate it with your fam.” It becomes really messy, and it’s really fun, and I don’t know that I love eating any other way more than I love eating this way.
SA: That’s also my favorite way to eat! I’m Ethiopian-American. So much of how we eat is around [the spongy flatbread] injera, or a mesob [similar to a bread basket], or a giant plate, where we’re collectively eating and feeding each other. I love that. I love being on top of each other.
CU: It’s the best feeling!
SA: What sparked your interest in cooking? It sounds like it definitely came from family, but what about your career path?
CU: I moved to New York City 12 years ago. I was just so sad; I was like, There’s no Cambodian food here. I’m homesick, I don’t know how to make this. To this day, I call up my mom for recipes. And to this day, she’s like, “I literally cannot believe this is your profession, that you are a cook, because you hated it so much, and you hated all of our food so much. And now you’re craving it.”. It wasn’t until I got my passport that I took my return trip back to Cambodia since leaving the refugee camp. I was like, Oh shit, there’s so much here that is still here for me to understand. I think it was in 2015 that I committed to studying and learning more and taking more time to understand where I came from. It wasn’t deeply spoken about, and then because of that, I think it snowballed into my pop up [Kreung], which was a space for me, my mom and my family to connect and cook together. And because of that pop up, we were able to connect with a lot of people in New York City who were part of our diaspora. Some of my earlier pop ups felt like the most important ones, because I didn’t realize how broken my own heart was, being separated from so many people from my culture. Even now, when I go back to Cambodia to study, I’ll get a hug from an elder who’s like, “They ripped us all apart. They took so much of us away from each other.” It’s so important to me to keep going, for my culture. I have had the ability to help my mom have the garden of her dreams, which is a source of joy for her. She’ll grow all the things, and I’ll buy everything from her to support it.
SA: Are there things that your mom tells you about growing plants here that’s different from growing plants back home?
CU: She said that she has the worst green thumb in Cambodia. But I don’t believe her because her garden is incredible. I can tell you that she and I were experimenting with growing brown rice, and she built a whole new swamp environment to host these specific rice herbs. I’m like, “You know how to do all of this intuitively.” Honestly, she’s the artist.
SA: Do you identify as an artist?
CU: I think I’m on my way. I’m always on a journey. I really love learning right now, and I’m trying to give myself more of that, across the board.