SFReview
photo credit: Mary Lagier
Nyum Bai
This spot is Permanently Closed.
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There are a lot of perks to moving to Mars - from being a colonizing pioneer of the final frontier to never bumping into your old high school classmates at the grocery store again. And because of that, there are a lot of companies working to make space travel a common thing. That’s all well and good, but we wish some of them would shift their attention away from space travel and toward perfecting teleportation. Partially because it would make getting to Jupiter’s moons easier, but mostly so we could set up a portal to Nyum Bai in Oakland.
Nyum Bai is a casual Cambodian spot in Fruitvale and while getting to this place isn’t a monumental achievement, and being beamed here isn’t totally necessary, the food is so good that you’ll wish you could show up here whenever you felt like it.
When you walk into Nyum Bai, the first thing you notice are the smells of different soups, stews, and noodle dishes passing by as servers deliver them to other tables. It’ll make you want to stop reading that article on rocket fuel advancements from the Lyft over and start trying to figure out what dish that was that just smelled better than James Earl Jones sounds. You can take turns swapping back and forth between staring at the food next to you and scanning the menu at Mach 2, but it won’t matter because pretty much anything you order is going to be one of the best things you’ve eaten in a long time.
photo credit: Mary Lagier
The menu isn’t huge, but everything you eat at Nyum Bai is bright and flavorful. Each dish features ingredients like palm sugar, mango, and red peppers, and - much like your first few days as a trailblazer on Saturn - nothing you get here will ever be boring. Even if you’ve never had Cambodian food, one of the things that makes the food here so good is that it’s all familiar in some way. Not because they have stir-fried noodles or something else you’ve actually tasted - it’s more about the details. Like how the sauce with the Prahok Ktiss seems like the cool cousin of a bolognese, or how the black pepper and caramelized pork in the Koh has a lot in common with Texas-style brisket. And like brisket, a lot of what you’ll eat here is comfort food to one degree or another - from crispy catfish piled high with mango salad to a giant bowl of Kuy Teav Phnom Pen that can cure any hangover you throw at it.
When you’re at Nyum Bai, it can feel like you’re in two places at once. The inside is small, but bright with white walls and decorations that look inspired by Miami Vice - it almost feels like you’re in a cantina on some sort of beach planet. But when you walk up to this place, it looks like you’re at a backyard party. There are outdoor tables, some of which back up to booths selling pinatas next door and others that are inside a garage. And while you wait to sit, there’s a small courtyard full of other people hanging out and waiting their turn to eat banana blossom salad with as much enthusiasm as if they were watching a shuttle launch.
Nyum Bai may not be as far away as Titan, but being able to ride a wormhole here would make life on Earth a whole lot better. It’s a fun spot with food that’s way beyond what you’d typically get for a casual weeknight dinner, and until the space moguls realize this and start working on making Rick and Morty portal guns a reality, Nyum Bai is still worth the quick ride across the bridge to Fruitvale.