I’ve seen it spelled both Sreyvong and Srey Vong, but I’m going with what they have in their Yelp listing. Beyond that they don’t seem to have a lot of internet presence, though this reel on Facebook looks like it’s from the restaurant or someone who works there.
So this is a new one for me—not just the restaurant itself, which I found through the very normal, very ordinary, process of scrolling through the restaurants section on the Instacart app while watching TV, but the Cambodian banh mi that they serve. The Cambodian banh mi is also known as num pang, although Wikipedia describes it as being on a short roll, which this definitely isn’t; sorry for the lack of photos, but the bread here is exactly the same long roll that you get with a Vietnamese banh mi. Perhaps that’s just easier for them to source.
We ordered: loc lac banh mi, banh sung noodles, sausage, coconut iced coffee, Cambodian lemonade.
I’ve been to a handful of Cambodian joints in the Lowell area (Red Rose is my fave, but we go to the Simply Khmer in Chelmsford the most often because of convenience), but I’ve never seen a banh mi (or num pang) on the menu, so this seemed like a “good cheap lunch option” for today. (It wound up being $90-something plus tip, as it turns out, because nothing is cheap anymore and delivery even less so. But what’re you gonna do, the dishwasher is broken and the guy doesn’t get here till Friday. So I’m paying to have fewer dishes to hand wash. There we go.)
Per the Yelp reviews, one of the differences between banh mi and num pang is that at least some kinds of num pang come with tomato sardine on them, which people who were not expecting it were unhappy about. Well, I got the beef loc lac banh mi, and there was no sardine there—so maybe it’s just on the pork, combo, or special banh mi?
All I can say for sure is that my banh mi was great. There have been a few banh mi places in Nashua, and I’ll be honest … I have not loved any of them. They’ve all been fine when you really want a banh mi, but not that much better than the ones you could get at the checkout counter at Battambang in Lowell for like $2, which I know was over ten years ago. My favorite banh mi in the Extended Nashua Cinematic Universe is still Viet Citron’s in Burlington; yall got one in Somerville now, I believe.
I can’t do an apples to apples with Viet Citron because I got a different filling, but the options at Khat Sreyvong are very cool: various combinations of pork cuts, grilled steak, meatballs (of the kind you get in pho, I believe), sausage, phak lov (pork organs in a sweet sauce, probably my next order), and loc lac. Loc lac is such a great idea for a sandwich filling, so I had to try that today. It was not as lime-forward as I’m used to, but I’m recovering from a chicken pox vaccination* and my palate seems to be a little dulled.
What’s really interesting to me about these sandwiches is that instead of the carrot and daikon pickle of a Vietnamese banh mi, they use “papaya pickle” (which I think is likely the same as their papaya salad, minus the herbs and crabs and such). That and the chile sauce both come on the side; the sandwich is otherwise dressed only with lettuce and a little sesame sauce. No mayonnaise or pate that I see. The combination is really nice and very filling. The bread is great, even after traveling from Lowell to Nashua and being a little soggy in the corner.
Mrs C got the banh sung noodles, which come with pork and shrimp and more of that chile sauce on the side. “Very good, but not as good as the noodles I get at our other places,” she says. They seem similar to the vermicelli plates you get at Vietnamese joints.
They have a few rice plates (including loc lac in non-sandwich form), soups (nom banh jok and somlor machu krueng), and prahok ktiss, which I will probably try in the future. We got the mini sausages as well—I don’t like them quite as much as the Lao sausage at Lanxang Star (they’re drier, probably leaner), but it’s that same family of funky fermented-tasting sausages, a little bit sweet. They’re probably great on the sandwich, if they cut them into smaller pieces. To be clear, I love the ones at Lanxang Star, so liking these a little less will not stop me from ordering them every single time.
The coconut iced coffee that Yelp likes is just okay to my taste. It tastes like coconut milk with a little coffee, which is to say, fine, but I guess I’m used to more strongly-flavored coffee. I like the Cambodian lemonade better (it comes with either green or red tea, so it’s really a Cambodian Arnold Palmer; I got it with green).
*This is a bit disjointed because of that vaccination, I think. Yes, a chicken pox vaccine, not shingles. Never had chicken pox as a kid, which came up when I was going to get the shingles vax; after a blood test and a lot of confused discussion, my doctor’s office eventually decided I needed the chicken pox vaccine first. It sucks, FYI. But chix pox sux more.
