Capital of Canada

Pat Vann plating a dish of Phanaeng Kai (red curry chicken) in the kitchen of his restaurant in Kingston.Johnny C.Y. Lam/The Globe and Mail.

His older two sons had moved away, and his youngest didn’t want to work in the business. “And then he would just be like, if you want to quit and open up a restaurant, I’ll teach you.” Pat always trained the people who bought his restaurants, for six months or even up to a year, if they needed more time to learn. Pat and his wife still work 12 hours most days, even when the restaurant isn’t open, though his oldest son Savon does most of the cooking now. One of Pat’s grandsons, Payton, is playing among folded tables and chairs during our chat in the restaurant, just as the lunchtime takeout orders are starting to pick up. Over the next 10 years he opened and sold four more places in the downtown core: Cambodian Village, Phnom Penh, a restaurant that is now called Royal Angkor, and Cambodiana. Most of the Cambodian people in the area worked at a refrigeration factory, Pat’s son Saveth remembers. In 1985 when Pat was 29, the family arrived in Canada with nothing and knowing no one. He grew up in Phnom Penh and was cooking for his six younger siblings by his mid-teens. Many Cambodian refugees settled in Quebec, where Pat and his family might have stayed had their first night in Montreal been a bit warmer. Pat himself is a slight figure in his late 60s, with hands that seem too large for his little frame because of joints swollen by years of work. And I guess it is difficult to describe, but it is unrecreatable for me,” Allen says. Toronto’s Khmer Thai was founded and is still owned by Sarann and Jade Chhouk, who traded renovation work for eight months of live-in training with the Vann family.