France and Cambodia: cooking across cultures
Elephant Walk is a sophisticated restaurant where the food is not only delicious, but beautifully presented.
Nadsa de Moneiro has trained cooks from China, Vietnam, Colombia,
Salvador, and Cambodia to work in Elephant Walk kitchens.
Nadsa and Longteine de Monteiro were pioneers in opening up Boston's restaurant scene in the early '90s. Their first Elephant Walk restaurant started in a Somerville basement. Though some might have thought it just another ethnic hole-in-the-wall, Elephant Walk was different. The menu featured French dishes on one side, Cambodian on the other. The cooking, the décor, even the way the de Monteiro family interacted with customers were novelties for Boston. Elephant Walk was a sophisticated restaurant where the food was not only delicious, but beautifully presented. Cloth napkins, beer and wine, and a genteel level of hospitality distinguished the restaurant. Within months, word spread about its sophisticated food.
"We tried to tell people that pairing the two cuisines is not at all gimmicky," says Nadsa. French cuisine was popular in Cambodia for 100 years, part of a colonial presence. Beyond their cooking, the family's story helped garner attention. Longteine de Monteiro and her late husband, who was a diplomat, fled Cambodia with their family when the Khmer Rouge took over. After a comfortable life among the elite of Cambodian society, Longteine opened a restaurant in Paris to support her family. When her daughter Nadsa moved to Boston, the family followed.
By now, there are three Elephant Walks: one in Boston near the Brookline line, one in Cambridge near Porter Square, and a third in Waltham. Nadsa, outspoken and lively, tells of the heady days in Somerville after a favorable Boston Globe review set the spotlight on the restaurant. Suddenly one Saturday night, there were "people waiting in the stairwell, in the elevator, sitting in the hallway," she says. Her ex-husband finally went out with a huge tray of spring rolls and explained to the customers that the staff was overwhelmed by the response. "People started clapping and cheering," she says.
In those first years, Nadsa would offer specials to tempt people to try samiah machou, a tangy soup with shrimp and plum tomatoes, or amok royal, a custard-like crab, scallop, and fish mixture steamed in a banana leaf. By 1997, when the Waltham restaurant opened as Carambola (later changed to Elephant Walk), Bostonians and suburbanites were clamoring for these delicacies. Now Longteine finds particular pleasure in teaching classes on Cambodian cooking to home cooks.
The family's restaurants have opened up Boston to more than Cambodian food. Nadsa says that her Boston restaurant had one of the first black managers in Boston, and that their kitchen is a mélange of cultures from Chinese, Vietnamese, Colombian, and Salvadoran to Cambodian. The Cambodians, several of whom have been with the de Monteiros since the first restaurant opened, were invaluable at training others in the proper cooking traditions.
By the time their third restaurant opened, there were no Cambodian cooks to be found in Waltham. So Nadsa trained a staff of Mexicans for Carambola, as the restaurant was then called. "Lo and behold, Carambola had the tastiest Cambodian food, and they were all Mexicans," she says. Which was fine with Nadsa and her mother. It's cross-cultural cooking like this that "opens up the world."
