Seventeen years ago, a family opened Crab Hut on Convoy. Their first restaurant, dedicated to how they grew up eating in Vietnam—tables full of seafood boil. They bootstrapped it. Chaos was not in short supply, and so were the people who showed up. Kingfisher is the ambitious extension of that dream.
Kingfisher exec chef David Sim was born and raised in San Diego, his parents refugees from Cambodia. They worked long hours at their sewing shop to make a new life. So he started cooking at age seven, playing “Iron Chef” with his brothers and cousins. “We didn’t have much—maybe just some onions and rice,” he says. “So we would make onion fried rice. It was simple, but it taught me how to make good food out of basic ingredients.”
Get that congee with morels, crispy garlic, garlic chives, cilantro, egg yolk, and spicy housemade “Sim”-bal sauce. Also, the the smoked dry-aged duck with XO sauce and nước mắm chimichurri (sells out almost every night). But to taste where he’s from, order the fantastic whole fried fish in ginger sweet and sour sauce. “That’s my childhood on a plate,” he says. “My mom would make this every weekend, and it was always my favorite thing.”
