Two sisters bring Cambodian cuisine to Seaside, hiding in a boba tea shop.

Outside of Cambodia, there aren’t many places to try Cambodian food. There are certain American cities with sizable Cambodian-American communities – Long Beach, Stockton and Seattle among them – but apart from those places, it’s nearly impossible to find in the U.S.

But you can find it in Seaside, hiding in plain sight in the heart of Seaside’s downtown. Its sign describes a “Boba bar - small bites - sweets.”

Congo Go! has all those things, made from scratch, but with steady, gradual additions to the menu of various Cambodian dishes in its year-and-a-half since opening, it’s now become a bonafide Cambodian restaurant just finding its legs.

The mixed identity is by design, sort of. Thea and Bea Kun, the sisters who opened Congo Go! in March 2024, didn’t think a Cambodian restaurant would play in Seaside. Who knew about Cambodian food? People would scratch their heads, they thought.

So they decided to do a boba bar and keep it fun for kids, at first. But before long Thea, a chef trained in fine dining, added a Cambodian-style marinated beef rice bowl with pickles, an over-easy egg and crispy onions to the menu. It was a hit.

Soon, she added a Cambodian salad with glass noodles and cabbage, carrots, cucumber, peppers, onions, mint and peanuts – with the option of added protein – that has the fresh, sweet and savory crunch of spring rolls. Then came a Cambodian version of pho called kathiew – and customers loved that too, so the additions have been continuing ever since.

Thea and Bea were both born in America but had an immigrant’s upbringing. Their parents survived the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s and ended up as refugees in a camp in Thailand. In 1986, they were sponsored by American missionaries to come to Georgia, where Thea was born, and then they moved a year later to Stockton, where there were relatives and other Cambodians.

It was a hard life – they lived in public housing and were “in the system,” Thea says, for their entire childhood. And where their parents had fled Cambodia due to violence, the sisters saw those in their neighborhood getting involved in gangs and vowed not to fall into it.

After Thea graduated from high school, she moved to Florida in 2010 to go to culinary school, and worked her way up in kitchens starting as a dishwasher. She came to Seaside in 2014 with her military husband, and soon decided to stay. While she was working in the kitchen at Sur in the Barnyard in 2017, she convinced Bea to join her on the Monterey Peninsula. Bea started at Sur as a server and was then promoted to manager.

“We found we worked very well together,” Bea says. “[After that], everywhere she went, I went.”

The last of those places was The Pocket, where Thea was executive chef and Bea manager. “We were very successful,” Bea says. “Once we got that experience, we were like, ‘We’re ready.’”

Cambodian food is similar but distinct from the cuisines of surrounding countries – Thailand, Vietnam and Laos – and features many of the same flavors, like ginger, lemongrass, star anise and galangal. Among the reasons it’s less prominent than Thai and Vietnamese food is that the Cambodian diaspora is relatively small – about 150,000 Cambodian refugees settled in the U.S. from 1975 to 1994 – and only in this century has there been a concerted effort to start introducing it to the world.

Many of the names for the Congo Go!’s dishes are taken from Vietnamese and Thai menus so that customers understand what they are, like the pho. Thea bakes her own baguettes for Congo Go!’s banh mi – don’t ask to hold the paté and you’ll understand the dish’s popularity. She prides herself in sourcing quality, “clean” – she means preservative-free – ingredients.

Business has grown over the past year and for now, Thea and Bea are going with the flow, knowing they opened a restaurant at a challenging time, in a place where Cambodian food wasn’t on the map.

“We just need to create a market for it,” Thea says. “Now, we’re finally at that point where we can do that.”

CONGO GO! 800 Broadway Ave., Seaside. 202-1829, congogobobacafe.com.