It’s been a while since my last restaurant report from St. Paul (on lunch at Homi); and it has been even longer since my last report on a meal at Kolap. As you may know, Kolap is the Twin Cities #2 Cambodian restaurant. It’s hard to deny Cheng Heng the top spot, both because of how long they’ve been around and because of their extensive menu. Kolap’s menu is much more edited. As at Cheng Heng, there’s a fair bit on it that’s not Cambodian per se—though, as always, a lot of food in the region crosses national borders. But it’s not hard to suss out the Cambodian specialties on the menu and the friendly staff will be only to happy to assist you in any case. The Cambodian dishes are done very well and are well worth a trip. That’s what we’d thought when we ate there in 2018 and we’d planned to come back soon. We didn’t manage it in 2019 and then the pandemic intervened and we lost sight of many a restaurant. Well, I’m glad to say we finally made it back this past weekend, accompanied by friends who we eat out with regularly. Here’s how it went. Continue reading →

It took us 10 years of living within 50 minutes drive of it to finally get to Cheng Heng, the Twin Cities’ premier Cambodian restaurant. I reviewed it earlier this year and described it as probably the only Cambodian restaurant in the area. I was informed in the comments that there was in fact another not too far away: Kolap. You can certainly—accurately—see this as evidence of how unreliable a guide I am to the Twin Cities’ food scene. On the other hand, you might also be able to see it as evidence of how little attention these restaurants—and others not too far away from them on University Ave. that specialize in cuisines from other Southeast Asian countries—get from the local mainstream food media. That’s my alibi, at any rate. It is, of course, not the case that Kolap is totally obscure: in looking it up I discovered that the New York Times had included it two years ago in a piece on the diverse food scene of St. Paul. The New York Times may from time to time associate Minnesota with things like grape salad, but it also apparently does a better job than the local media sometimes of highlighting hidden jewels. In any event, it did not take us as long to get to Kolap after learning of its existence as it had to get to Cheng Heng. We ate there with friends a couple of weeks ago. Here is my report.  Continue reading →