CAMPBELL RECORDER
Your Community Recorder newspaper serving all of Campbell County
THURSDAY, MAY 27, 2021 | BECAUSE COMMUNITY MATTERS | PART OF THE USA TODAY NETWORK ###
7 DAY
MEATS SALE! With Card • Prices valid until 6/2 • While Supplies Last
YOU’LL BE Delighted
To save the urban farm next door, a Covington architect helped create plan Julia Fair Cincinnati Enquirer USA TODAY NETWORK
TC and Karen Long, photographed in their restaurant, Kampuchea Kitchen, a Cambodian bistro in Fort Thomas. PHOTOS BY AMANDA ROSSMANN/THE ENQUIRER/AMANDA ROSSMANN
Cambodian cafe serves up memories of love and loss in Kentucky Keith Pandolfi | Cincinnati Enquirer | USA TODAY NETWORK
Inside Kampuchea Kitchen, T.C. Long and his wife, Karen, are the only ones working. The lunch crowd has thinned out to the point where I’m the only one left in the dining room. On a television, a woman sings beautiful songs in a language that I will never understand. The restaurant is painted a deep shade of violet and decorated with trees and plants that I realize, upon further inspection, are artifi cial. Even so, the sunshine pouring in through the windows illuminates each synthetic leaf like an emerald, making them seem real. Buddhist statues are stationed throughout the room. Long tells me he and Karen wanted their restaurant to feel like a traditional cafe in Phnom Penh, where he grew up. And although I’ve never been to Phnom Penh, and this is Fort Thomas, Kentucky, I have a feeling they succeeded. The fi rst dish I order – a puff pastry fi lled with shredded chicken, mild curry and vegetables – is a sign that I haven’t been led astray by the good things I’ve heard about this place. The pastry is buttery, a
little bit fl akey; the shredded chicken, peas and carrots immensely comforting and somewhat familiar as they remind me of Indian samosas. Next comes a bowl of cold rice noodles with pickled papaya in a sweet and sour fi sh sauce. It’s seasoned with fresh herbs and delicious little hunks of stir-fried chicken. It has all the fl avors I love – let’s call them clean fl avors: the fl avors of fi sh sauce, crunchy carrots and cucumbers. Cambodian cuisine can be hard to pin down since it shares similarities with the cuisines of other places, including Thailand, southern China, India and Vietnam. Like those other cuisines, Cambodian food tells the story of colonialism and occupation; confl ict and displacement; separation and heartbreak. In a way, it tells the story of chef Long, himself. Over a tall Khmer coff ee fi lled with pellet ice, he tells me how, after he was separated from his parents in 1979, he escaped the Khmer Rouge by fi nding a See CAFE, Page 8A
Melissa Baird moved to Covington’s Westside neighborhood in October 2020 just steps away from Orchard Park, a community garden. The half-acre space, bursting with chickens, tomatoes and bees, drew Baird and her husband, Austin Zanella, to the neighborhood. It was even featured on their home’s Zillow webpage. Five months later, the city of Covington announced plans to seek developers to transform part of the space into single-family homes. The gardeners weren’t happy. Seven years ago, they transformed the city-owned lot into the garden. They didn’t want to lose their space to newly constructed homes and condos. Baird, a Covington-based architect with WorK Architecture + Design, had an idea. For a month and a half, she worked on a plan with a group of seven Northern Kentucky companies to save the garden and add homes to the block. The group got an endorsement from the gardeners and submitted its plan to the city on May 4.
Creating the proposal When Baird read about the city’s request for development proposals at her block’s beloved garden, she reached out to her friend, Joe Stevie, a Northern Kentucky developer with the Covington-based company Sparen Realty. “I'm a neighbor so I want to see development in the neighborhood instead of vacant dilapidated buildings,” Baird said. Stevie had been reading about the opportunity himself when Baird’s email pinged into his inbox. Stevie and the companies created a plan to save the garden and add seven single-family homes — including a Habitat for Humanity home — and a nine-unit condominium to the block, according to the development application shared with The Enquirer. They estimate the condos will be no more than $350,000 and the homes will be between $350,000 and $475,000. “We want them to be aff ordable, and we want to get a wide variety of people living there,” Stevie said. See FARM, Page 2A
Kampuchea Kitchen, in Fort Thomas, is a Cambodian bistro founded in January 2020 by executive chef TC Long.
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Susan Utell works on her plot of garden space at Orchard Park in Covington. For the last seven years residents have turned the plot of land into a community garde. ALBERT CESARE / THE ENQUIRER
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