It’s easy to drive right by Nice & Neat Dry Cleaning on bustling Route 9 in Putnam County. The nondescript building and understated wood sign barely catch the eye, but when the backyard transforms into a Cambodian food stand during the warm months, savvy locals know where to go.
At the weekend food pop-up, conversation flows as patrons devour savory dumplings, grilled meat skewers, and more daring traditional Southeast Asian fare. The serene surroundings along the western bank of gurgling Clove Creek make it possible to ignore the traffic roaring by.
But behind the façade, there’s a lot more than a make-good on the American dream. Flanked by the Hudson Highlands to the west and rugged Fahnestock State Park to the east, Cambodian dissidents Sokhara Kim and Chakra Oeur have found a safe harbor and a base from which to protest their home country’s plight.
As cultural caretakers, they help preserve the fragile heritage of the Khmer people, the country’s main ethnic group, with art and food that evokes history and tradition. Oeur writes poetry, works on his memoir, and maintains a gallery of sketches, paintings, and sculptures that reflect his experience with the infamous Killing Fields of the 1970s, when the Khmer Rouge regime killed over a million people.
They both got out in 1981 and their painful past is palpable. Describing her escape from a labor camp, Kim pauses and closes her eyes, as if blotting out the feelings. “There were 300 teenagers in the camp,” she says in a muted voice. “Only 15 survived.”
Persecuted by the Khmer Rouge, Oeur joined a guerilla insurgency after the Vietnamese invasion in 1978. “I walked through bullets falling like rain and never got wet and walked through fire as bombs dropped from B-52s, but I didn’t get burned,” the poet says. “I must be made of Kryptonite.”
Oeur’s face furrows when speaking about his homeland and he often looks off to the distance, searching for an answer to the question that his stern stare seems to ask: What can I do to end the centuries of suffering?
They have returned home several times, but the experience is unsettling because the one-party government stifles dissent and siphons off the country’s wealth. “As a Cambodian,” Ouer says, “I can’t even go into a restaurant in Sihanoukville” (the country’s resort region, where casinos and drab high-rises are displacing the local population).
Kim’s rural province, Kampot, is particularly hard hit by poverty and neglect, so she collects money to buy backpacks, uniforms, and even shoes for schoolchildren. Someday, she wants to build a library filled with books about Khmer history, a subject not taught in school, she says.
“When I go home, I enjoy it for about five days and then it hits me: My people are so poor in their own country and they can’t even talk about it,” she says. “They have nothing.”
To help forget, Kim stays in motion, often working 12-hour days making alterations and serving customers at the dry cleaning operation. So why prepare, cook, and serve pretty much everything from scratch on hot summer weekends?
“I should rest and relax, but it’s fulfilling to see the curious faces people make when they take that first bite,” she says. “All the hard work melts away and it makes me want to keep going.”
Kim’s cuisine elicits puzzled looks as diners try to identify the layered flavors and textures. That’s chayote squash, sesame paste, and carrots in the vegetarian dumplings. The popular lotus blossom cookies include rice flour, coconut milk, sesame seeds, and palm sugar. “I’m trying to offer a summer breeze of flavors,” says Kim. Using coconut oil, she contends, offers a light touch that doesn’t soak into the ingredients in a greasy way like soybean or peanut oil.
In Cambodia, snakehead fish is a delicacy, though it’s typically viewed as an acquired taste outside of Southeast Asia. Instead, Kim uses branzino in summer pop-up specials.
Dumplings and egg rolls (carrots, glass noodles made from mung beans, and malanga root, similar to taro) are always on the menu. Also, marinated beef and chicken as entrees or sandwiches, which are served on a roll with a spear of crisp cucumber, mild jalapeno, pickled vegetables and a sprig of cilantro.
One of the most interesting specials, amok, a curry-style dish with fish, chicken or vegetables over a bed of rice noodles, presents a distinctive mix of flavors that pops like a carbonated beverage. Nam banh chok is another curry-based plate served on the mild side, typically with branzino, rice noodle and a green fish sauce.
Kim and Oeur first met at a refugee camp in Thailand. He went on to settle in Washington, DC, and found steady work restoring churches. Kim landed in Westchester County and acquired the Nice & Neat property in Cold Spring with help from her sponsor, opera singer Mary Judd.
Around 1984, she opened a restaurant, Sambata Cuisine, which specialized in Chinese dishes with a Cambodian accent. “There wasn’t much around here back then, and people weren’t ready for that kind of food,” Kim says. Sambata closed in 1992 and Kim pivoted to Nice & Neat. Drawing on the sewing skills she learned growing up on her family’s silk farm, she offered alteration and tailoring services in addition to dry cleaning.
She reunited with Oeur in 2006. He needed a kidney, she obliged. Then came marriage, the second one for both.
Oeur is one of the most accomplished Cambodian-American artists to emerge from the diaspora of war, exhibiting at the Smithsonian Institution and the Field Museum in Chicago, among other venues. His outdoor studio, entered beneath a wooden archway, centers on a handmade shack, trellises, several birdhouses, and piles of raw material that may or may not be used in future projects.
Although his ongoing kidney ailment causes him to move a bit more slowly these days, Oeur is constructing an eight-foot-tall fiberglass-coated elephant that will occupy a corner of the property. These majestic animals, which dragged the stones that built Cambodia’s great temples, remain a symbol of pride and tradition.
As for Kim, her method of transmitting Cambodian pride and traditions is through the kitchen. And she’s not precious about her cooking secrets. “I’d like to teach customers how to make and cook the dumplings,” she says. “People tell me, ‘if you teach them how to make them, they won’t buy them from you anymore,’ and that’s fine. They can eat them in the winter when I’m not open. I think people would be excited to learn and it would be fun.”
S & C Food Cart. Saturdays and Sundays, May to September or October, depending on the weather. 3154 Route 9, Philipstown. (845) 265-2770.
NOTE: Kim will be off site on July 16 (at Brews With View II in Cold Spring) and August 13 and September 10 (at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Cold Spring).