Santa Rosa chef ‘happy’ to showcase his culture through his authentic Laotian cuisine

The crowd at Shady Oak Barrel House on a recent Friday evening noshed on skewers of lemon grass beef and chicken satay, sampled Laotian sausage in banh mi and slurped bowls of khao poon, a chicken noodle soup.

Chef Keo Xayavong sold out of everything at his pop-up, which coincided with the start of Songkran, the Lao New Year. The banh mi were the most popular item, but he got a lot of people to try the soup — rice vermicelli noodles cooked in a complex sweet-and-sour broth of red curry and coconut milk infused with the heady aroma of lemon grass and makrut lime (also known as kaffir lime).

“Pop-ups have been big,” Xayavong said. “It allows people like myself to showcase another ethnic cuisine you don’t normally have at restaurants and do more authentic food. I’m really happy to showcase my culture.”

A lot of people already have tried Laotian cuisine without ever realizing it, Xayavong noted.

“A lot of Lao food has been hidden on Thai menus,” he said. “Lao immigrants would come here and open restaurants but label them Thai restaurants because, at the time, Thailand was more well-known.”

For example, the papaya salad on the menu at Savor, the Vietnamese cafe on Montgomery Drive in Santa Rosa where we met to chat, is ubiquitous on menus at Southeast-Asian restaurants, he said. But Xayavong added, its origin is “true Lao.”

So is laab, or larb as it’s sometimes written on Thai restaurant menus. He explained the Lao alphabet has no r.

“It’s the national dish of Laos,” he said. “It’s essentially a minced-meat salad made with aromatics: lemon grass, kaffir lime and galangal, which I call the Southeast-Asian mirepoix.”

Xayavong, a 41-year-old father of four, chatted about the intersection of food, Southeast-Asian geopolitics and the idea of authenticity. It’s a topic at the forefront of his cooking, thanks in part to being in an interracial marriage with mixed-race children.

There’s a sense of pride knowing that more and more people are taking an interest in Laotian cuisine, he said. He is “Laod and proud,” he said, with a broad smile.

But sharing the cuisine of their homeland wasn’t always easy for his family when he was growing up. Like many immigrants, Xayavong understands having others label your food as “smelly” or “weird” or even just judging it with a look of veiled disgust is hurtful, not only personally but to the broader benefits of cross-cultural exchange.

“We isolated ourselves, unintentionally,” he said of the tight-knit Southeast-Asian community he grew up in. “It was a cultural mindset. We were in fear of introducing it to the outside world and kept food to ourselves somewhat.”

Adapting culinary traditions

Xayavong’s family moved to Humboldt County in 1985, just as he turned 4 years old. He was born in a refugee camp in Thailand where his family fled at the end of the United States’ “secret war” in Laos. They settled in Eureka along with refugees from neighboring Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand.

“Every function revolved around food, and that’s how I got my love of food ... watching the grown-ups cooking,” Xayavong said. “During gatherings, I would play with friends, but for the most part I was in the kitchen watching adults cook.”

It was during these formative years that he learned both the necessity and delight of culinary adaptation.

“One of my fondest memories is seeing asparagus for the first time,” he said. “In the East, asparagus is just not native. We’d use it like bamboo shoots because the texture was really familiar, and fresh bamboo was nearly impossible to find. We called them ‘the foreigners’ bamboo shoots.’ We had no name for it.”

In Laos, river moss is a common food, he said. For awhile, his family harvested it from rivers in Humboldt County, but concerns about the cleanliness of the water drove them to try spinach instead.

“We figured out cooked spinach had the same texture of river moss,” he said. “We ended up using cooked spinach and blending it in a blender, which obviously we never used before. We always used mortar and pestle.”

Xayavong said his family used the spinach in a soup that, in Laos, is made with snails.

“That’s two dishes that being here in the western world gave us the opportunity to make new discoveries,” he said. “Everybody’s looking at the same picture but is seeing something different, you know? We saw the same spinach and we saw the same asparagus, but we saw something different.”

That’s a mindset he’s carried with him throughout his career as a chef. He developed a love for sushi early on, learning the ropes at a sushi restaurant in Sacramento before moving to Sonoma County, where he ran the sushi bar at Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. Later, with chef Ed Metcalfe, he opened Shiso restaurant in Sonoma. The pair now have Sushimotos, a mobile sushi bar and catering business.

Xayavong, who sees “food as a playground” enjoys creating culinary mashups. Once, for Cinco de Mayo, he created a carne asada sushi roll. More recently, he’s put together a dish called Goy Scallops, which he described as a Laotian ceviche made with Southeast-Asian aromatics and served in lettuce cups.

Finding his culinary roots

With the grilling season just getting underway, you’ll likely find Xayavong where he’s happiest — cooking outside over an open fire, either on his patio or at his family’s favorite retreat at Ruth Lake in Humboldt.

He considers the fields, forests and the Sonoma Coast part of his pantry, noting that he enjoys crabbing, fishing and foraging for fiddleheads and mushrooms especially — a hobby he picked up as a child.

“It gives me a taste of what my elders did,” he said. “They were hunters and gatherers back in Laos, foraging in the woods, living off of rivers. It gives me a connection I missed out on because I didn’t grow up there.”

He’s also an avid gardener and tends a small plot at his home in southeast Santa Rosa. Instead of filling it with typical summer vegetables like tomatoes and zucchini, Xayavong grows things that are harder to find, like shiso, Vietnamese coriander and Thai basil.

His garden also has a section dedicated to that “Southeast-Asian mirepoix” he mentioned, with a small but determined kaffir lime tree with stalks of lemon grass shooting up from its base next to a pot of galangal.

He’ll often pop outside to pick herbs to incorporate into a family dinner, whether he’s making tacos, burgers or something straight-up Lao, a reminder to his kids of their roots.

“I tell them as long as the Mekong River is flowing, my love of Lao food and love of my heritage is going to flow just like that, and I’m going to spread it to my kids and everybody around me.”

Chef Keo Xayavong wants his recipes to be as accessible as possible for everyone. Fish sauce, a staple of Laotian cuisine, is available these days at most grocery stores. Herbs like kaffir lime leaves, Vietnamese coriander, lemon grass and shiso leaf are available at Asian markets. That’s also where you easily can find Thai chiles and jars of sticky rice powder.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @JenInOz.