Taste With Andy

"How you cook is more important than what you cook." The line is lettered on the sign over the Cork Street East storefront, and it is the most honest way into Taste With Andy. The cook is Chan Thon Andy Phoung; the menu is Southeast Asian, running three traditions at once — Thai and Vietnamese across the front of the book, Cambodian threaded underneath. Andy's family is Khmer, and that thread is the part most Southeast Asian kitchens in southern Ontario never carry at all. Downtown Guelph has it.

Mom's Chicken Curry sits at the centre of the menu. Coconut broth, chicken, taro, and yam, slow-simmered into something that reads as a family recipe before it reads as a line item — the first order for anyone trying to understand the kitchen. From there the menu splits between comfort and heat. Drunken Noodles come broad and wok-fired, basil and bell peppers and garlic doing the sharper work, the kind of plate that arrives with real wok hei. Beef Khao Soi leans on red curry and kaffir lime. There is a signature pho, a clean Pad Thai, lemongrass beef skewers and chicken satay off the grill, crispy spring rolls to start. Order the soft and the sharp side by side and the menu makes the most sense.

The Cambodian thread surfaces clearest in the weekly rotation, which is where Andy's heritage gets the most room. A Khmer Burger — ground beef with lemongrass and honey — runs as a special; steak larb arrives with sticky rice; Andy's squash custard closes a meal in a register most Thai-Vietnamese kitchens don't reach for. For a first visit, the Bento Combo Box does the survey work in a single order, putting mango salad, chicken satay, a brisket grill, and Pad Thai on one plate at eighteen-fifty — the tri-cuisine sampler in miniature. The Vietnamese iced coffee is the drink to remember on the way out.

What the credo means in practice shows up in the prep. Every curry comes off a paste Andy makes by hand, and the menu sells a thirteen-dollar jar of his own super chili paste on its own — chili, garlic, white onion, no preservatives, with a portioning guide written right into the description: a quarter-tablespoon for mild, a full tablespoon for hot. There is no MSG, and the broths are slow-simmered rather than shortcut. The menu even marks which dishes carry shrimp paste and which carry soybean paste, so the vegan plates are built as their own dishes instead of stripped-down versions of the standard. These are the choices a cook makes after years of cooking at home, before ever cooking for anyone else.

Opening at the end of 2020 should have sunk a new restaurant, and this one held. The family recipes carried it; local reporting was soon calling the Cambodian cooking can't-miss; downtown's east-side regulars and the university crowd did the rest. Andy still runs the line the way the sign promises — curries paste-built, specials rotating, dietary asks handled as a default rather than an upsell: gluten-free flags across much of the menu, spice dialled up or down on request, a vegan section of its own.

The dining room is small and unfussy, open Tuesday through Saturday and closed at the start of the week, walk-in only and quick to fill on a Friday night. Much of it travels well, too, which is how a good share of the neighbourhood eats it. The bar keeps to beer and a few standards — nothing on the floor competes with the kitchen for attention. Order Mom's Chicken Curry first and the rest comes into focus: a cook, his family's recipes, and a chili paste he still makes one jar at a time.