My second visit to Sophon yielded probably the best cocktail I’ll drink all year. The Mekong is an homage to the frozen daiquiri. But instead of strawberries and TGI Friday’s vibes, it involves coconut and mangoes (ripe and green), fish sauce, and kampot peppers that owner Karuna Long’s cousin sends over from Cambodia.  

Each sip delivers cool sweetness and complexity: a beach read that morphs into Hemingway, then shifts again into memoir. The bar makes its own orgeat, using Cambodian-appropriate peanuts instead of the usual almonds, for velvet, roasty notes.  

The Mekong is available only to customers at the bar, largely because it requires a stint in a blender (which is wrapped in various cloth napkins to dampen the noise). A can that originally held Mae Ploy coconut cream serves as the glass, garnished with a fistful of mint and one perfect edible orchid—bright and refreshing, ready to tell a story of culture, of tragedy, and of one very unexpected career swerve. 

Karuna Long took over Phinney Ridge’s favorite cocktail bar, Oliver’s Twist, in 2017. He served craft drinks and a legacy food menu of truffled popcorn and stuffed dates to devoted regulars. Life was good. But when the world shut down in 2020, Long developed a takeout menu of the Khmer dishes he grew up making with his mom and brothers in Long Beach, California. By the time dining rooms reopened, he knew he needed to give this food its own restaurant. 

At Sophon, named for Long’s mother, bite-size pieces of chicken thigh or oyster mushroom are marinated in the signature Khmer spice paste kroeung, then dredged and fried with a kroeung-powered dipping sauce. (The mushrooms are more awe-inspiring, but let’s revisit the chicken once Long makes good on plans for binchotan grill on the back patio for street-style skewers.) The punchy salad of shredded green mango is something his mother made when frying chicken or fish. 

Today, 95.4 percent of Cambodia’s population is ethnically Khmer. But from the year 802 to 1431, the Khmer Empire ruled most of the Southeast Asia mainland. Today many Americans know this term in conjunction with the atrocious Khmer Rouge genocide. The Cambodian population in the Seattle area numbers just 18,000, but it’s the nation’s third-largest concentration. Long’s restaurant makes new space in our dining landscape for a food culture that deserves more light. 

On one visit, a Cambodian American dining companion’s eyes went straight to the sach ko ang—grilled beef with an herbacious fish sauce dressing called tuk prahok. “At every Cambodian party,” she explained, “you’re going to have steak and you’re going to have tuk prahok.” She needed to try the restaurant version. Sophon’s involves a coulotte steak layered with a tuk prahok that isn’t as pungent as my friend’s family recipe, but tells a story unto itself.  

Hunt it down in Phnom Penh, says Long, and you’ll find bits of crunchy eggplant, lemongrass, and the titular prahok, a fermented fish paste that underpins so many Khmer recipes. But he grew up in Long Beach, home to the largest concentration of Cambodians outside Cambodia. There, he says, his parents’ generation incorporated ingredients around them, like black olives and sun-dried tomatoes and pickled jalapenos from Mexican grocers. Sophon’s tuk prahok is a one-to-one blend of traditional and California versions—“a classic diaspora dish,” says Long. It’s rough-chopped and rustic, almost like a tapenade. The kitchen will happily send out the traditional recipe for diners who like more punch. 

Our table that night was a microcosm of the two types of diners common at Sophon. Some, like me, know the food only slightly, often thanks to Long and his Oliver’s Twist takeout menu (and some long-standing love for the food at the Phnom Penh restaurant in Little Saigon). Others are part of that diaspora of families who arrived here as refugees. Decades later, Khmer restaurants that seek an audience beyond Khmer communities remain rare.  

Amid wildly different sets of expectations and perspectives, Long has created a place that feels like an upscale-ish but chill neighborhood restaurant, drinks like a destination cocktail bar, and seemingly builds community for Seattle’s Khmer population as well as anyone who lives on Phinney Ridge or happens to wander in.

Sophon’s address down the street from Oliver’s Twist harbors ghosts of restaurants past, from vegetarian haven Carmelita to decidedly not-vegetarian smoked meat sandwich shop Martino’s. The dining room is both familiar and unrecognizable, its walls softened with woven kantael mats, krama textiles, and photos of Long’s family. Stone likenesses of King Jayavarman VII from the Bayon temple at Angkor gaze inscrutably from an enormous wall mural. Even the candies at the host stand are Khmer. 

Dishes like the nhoam salad—fat prawns, a tangle of herbs and vegetables, toasted peanuts and coconut atop rice vermicelli—illustrate the parallels with other Southeast Asian countries like Laos or Thailand. No surprise considering the Khmer Empire’s hold over all this geography for centuries. Lao cuisine has “more pungent profiles,” says Long, since it uses fermented shrimp paste rather than Cambodia’s prahok.  

Great sauce is Sophon’s common thread, from the vegan Thai basil aioli that turns seared cauliflower into a plant-based powerhouse, to the side order of “crack sauce” that hides on the back page of the food menu, ready to transform everything from plain rice to the grilled eggplant. Hate the name, love the condiment: crack sauce tastes like someone attempted to recreate chili oil using only ingredients from a well-cultivated herb garden. 

Hooray for servers who offer to replace plates, giving us a fresh canvas for fall-apart pork belly, braised in a mix of soy and coconut milk, and the mackerel in a pool of kroeung-sparked curry. A few more traditional dishes will soon hit the menu, including the star of Long’s takeout menu: slab moan baok—labor-intensive chicken wings stuffed with ground pork, peanuts, and glass noodles—and some glorious and snappy fermented sausages. 

A personal note from Long awaits on each table when you sit down. By coming to dinner it says, you are amplifying “the Khmer/Cambodian voices that have been silenced forever or silenced by trauma.” Asking diners to consider genocide alongside their cocktail order is a considerable highwire, bridged here with grace. Reading this card forms a built-in moment of reflection before a server arrives to discuss bar manager Dakota Etley’s beverage list, which exceeds the high expectations you can’t help but form when you hear that the owner of Oliver’s Twist just opened a restaurant. 

While Long was a fixture making drinks and conversation at Oliver’s Twist, he’s now head down in Sophon’s kitchen—“it’s become another love of mine, just as much as the bar.” He tries to leave the kitchen and touch tables every 45 minutes or so, but back there, prepping kroeung marinade and breaking down  pork belly, he’s proving there’s more than one way to form a connection. 

Sophon | 7314 Greenwood Ave N, Phinney Ridge, 206-644-7316