At Bayon Bistro in O’Fallon, Missouri, I succumbed to curiosity and ordered the dish I still hadn’t eaten after living in ºüÀêÊÓƵ for 21 years: Springfield cashew chicken. Credit Dara Thach, the chef and owner of Bayon Bistro, for finally inspiring me. Thach immigrated to Springfield, Missouri, from Cambodia in 1982. He grew up in Springfield, and his family has operated restaurants there. I was already going to recommend the Cambodian fare he prepares at Bayon Bistro. I figured I should try his Springfieldian cuisine, too.
Do I like Springfield cashew chicken? I’ll need to drive three hours southwest on Interstate 44 and conduct a thorough survey. I do like Thach’s version of the dish, tremendous chunks of juicy white-meat chicken that retain their deep-fried crispness in a thin brown sauce. The cashews scattered over the chicken give the dish more swagger than that sauce does. A garnish of chopped scallion snaps against chicken and cashews alike.
People are also reading…
Maybe Springfield cashew chicken entices you to visit Bayon Bistro, which opened last summer in a shopping plaza just off the Winghaven Boulevard exit from Interstate 64. Maybe the selection of sushi gets you in the door. The big, bright photographs of Cambodia decorating the dining-room walls will direct you to Bayon Bistro’s most appealing food, which would be worth the trip from outside the immediate area even if ºüÀêÊÓƵ didn’t lack other Cambodian restaurants.
A long, varied career in restaurants and hotels has led Thach to O’Fallon. He studied hospitality management at the Ohio State University and has worked in both the front of the house and the kitchen. A snowstorm early in his career, while he was a manager at the restaurant of a Marriott hotel in Boston, clarified his path. The restaurant’s chef was short-handed in the kitchen in this storm. Thach volunteered to trade his suit for an apron.
After that experience, he remembered telling himself, “I think I like cooking better.â€
The ºüÀêÊÓƵ section of Thach’s resume includes the Ritz-Carlton, ºüÀêÊÓƵ in Clayton and the late Busch’s Grove in Ladue during its opulent Lester Miller-run era. Thach was also a chef for P.F. Chang’s area locations. Most recently, he owned Asabi Bistro Sushi Bar in Lake Saint Louis. (He sold that restaurant to an employee.)
Bayon Bistro is the first restaurant where Thach is offering the cuisine of his native Cambodia. Still, he told me in an interview, he is taking it slowly. The Cambodian dishes represent a modest portion of the self-styled fusion restaurant’s extensive menu, sprinkled among the teriyaki, stir-fry, Chinese and American Chinese dishes. (The sushi menu, extensive by itself, is a separate document.)
Even without that context, you would probably want to begin your meal here with the Cambodian Street Wings: a plate of whole chicken wings, seasoned but not breaded, deep-fried to a crackling mahogany. On the side, for dipping, is a blend of tart lime juice and zippy, floral ground pepper. The sauce, similar to what traditionally accompanies Vietnamese shaking beef, develops a symbiotic relationship with the wings as you dip, absorbing the chicken’s glistening juices, evolving into a richer and even more flavorful version of itself.
You might also think about Vietnamese cuisine when you order a bowl of kuy teav, Cambodian rice noodle soup — especially if you choose slices of rare beef or those slices and beef meatballs as the soup’s meat option. (Chicken is also available.) The steaming arrangement looks like pho. The silky, beef-based broth is singular, though. Unlike pho’s notes of star anise or five-spice powder, kuy teav leads with a meaty essence that deepens into the lingering toasty sweetness of roasted garlic.
Cha kuy teav, from the selection of main courses, stir-fries rice noodles in a tamarind sauce with enough sour smack to slice through a generous serving of chicken (or you choice of protein), egg, peanut and vegetables as well as noodles. The dish is listed as spicy, and the server asked what I wanted on a scale from one to 10. I said 8.
The server gave me The Look — fellow cocksure heat freaks know it well — and I scaled back to 6. The server brought me extra chile sauce on the side to add to taste. In the end, I punched the cha kuy teav to my tolerance level without swamping the tamarind tartness. Cha kreung lemongrass, another stir-fry (minus the noodles, but with chicken or beef) is also labeled as spicy. The default heat is tepid, but the dish doesn’t need much more than lemongrass’ Day-Glo verdancy to grab your attention.
If anything, Bayon Bistro’s relatively few Cambodian dishes might work to the restaurant’s advantage, standing out among far more familiar options, from the Springfield cashew chicken and a fine, citrus-forward take on orange chicken to run-of-the-mill nigiri sushi (clumpy rice and a bit much wasabi for my taste) and rolls. Whatever brings you into Bayon Bistro, something truly new to the area does await you here.