Pork, rice noodles and sauces are main ingredients at Sophy’s Thai and Cambodian

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

In the six blocks of Anaheim Street between Redondo and Termino are three of the city’s finest, cheapest ethnic restaurants: Brite Spot, Dear Heart Thai, and Sophy’s Thai and Cambodian Food. Because it’s newest to me, Sophy’s is my favorite now—but I also like it for the ease with which its cooks marry the tastes of two Southeast Asian nations that, while tasting great together, rarely hold hands in public.

The location, once home to a supermarket, is prime. Brite Spot—best Mexican food ever—is directly across the street, and because Sophy’s is on higher ground, you can gaze across Anaheim into the dead eye of a freshly grilled Brite Spot perch as you sip your chilly Thai iced coffee. Or your Sapporo. Or your coconut milk from a fresh, shaved coconut, its top splintered open.

Dear Heart Thai, with its fiery coconut milk soups, is also within sight. But Sophy’s, which is Cambodian-run, does Thai soups too, and their Cambodian counterparts—so seamlessly that, aside from the taste, you scarcely know what country you’re eating. Sophy’s Thai hot pot soups are righteous—the Sterno flaming and the stock bubbling as the waitress dishes up your straw mushrooms, shrimp and chunks of chicken from a coconut milk-based broth as spicy as you can stand.

But if it’s Cambodian food you came for, the Phnom Penh Noodles are what you order. They serve it two ways here: as a soup or as a noodle dish. Get the soup; soup rules, and this is a good one. Obviously a relative of shabu shabu—the Japanese cook-your-own soup—and of pho, the so-called national soup of Vietnam, the Phnom Penh Noodles eats like a meal.

I’ve had it both ways, but ordering the soup for take-out is arguably more fun if you like playing chef. They send it out the door with the broth packaged separately, so when you get it home, you add your toppings, most of which are packaged in a large Styrofoam container. You get rice noodles, gorgeous pink shrimp, thin slices of tender pork, sliced green onions, cilantro, chopped garlic, and—reportedly—peanuts, though because I’m allergic and I didn’t get sick, I have to wonder about that. But you should ask. You also get pressed-pork meatballs (chock full of porky goodness) and slices of the compressed meat loaf that Asian soups are somewhat known for. Hard to say, but I think this one was, again, pork, making it—paraphrasing Southern Culture on the Skids—very nearly too much pork for just one fork. But good!

Then there’s a year’s supply of bean sprouts for garnish, and three kinds of chile sauce. The hot sauce is red with a ketchup consistency; it might be Sriracha, a.k.a. cock sauce, because of the rooster on the container. (Naughty!) The hotter sauce is very nearly dried, and rife with chile seeds; the hottest is liquid with the seeds, and it reads like a blend of the other two. Test them first, and make up your own mind; don’t let The Man tell you what kind of chile sauce goes in your soup.

If you saved room, try the chan pu, another Cambodian import, consisting chiefly of rice noodles, scrambled egg, and spicy crab meat, served mixed with chopped green onions. You’ll mainly notice the crab at first—that and the rice noodles, which are in so many dishes here—but the chile spices in the dish catch up to you, so handle with a little care. Less spicy but still delicious is the House Special BBQ Chicken: pieces of chicken marinated in a red wine sauce, then deep-fried with just enough skin for flavor. They come with a flavorful dipping sauce that tastes like it has some degree of hoisin plus, naturally, chile. It really isn’t hot, though, which lets the full flavor of the chicken come through.

Lastly, though it’s hardly dessert, finish with the Deep-Fried Squid—small rings and spirals of squid, battered in panko and fried, served on a bed of lettuce with pieces of diced green and red bell peppers. It’s good; they salt and pepper it before serving, but even better, it’s served with a dipping sauce of rice vinegar, Thai fish sauce (nam pla), salt, sugar and lime juice. It’s deliciously tangy, and the rice vinegar gives it a great bite. It’s the best sauce on the menu.

Which is saying something; at Sophy’s, virtually everything has a sauce.

SOPHY’S THAI AND CAMBODIAN CUISINE, 3720 E ANAHEIM ST, STE 102, LONG BEACH 90804. 562.494.1763. OPEN DAILY, 9AM-10PM. DINNER FOR TWO, $40-$50, EXCLUDING DRINKS. BEER AND WINE.

Tags: cambodian, Food, Long Beach, noodles, thai