Chef Santana Hem of the supper club Hem & Her
From the sidewalk of 35th Street in Church Hill, the white two-story house looks much like any other. The only hint at what awaits behind the front door is a smoking charcoal grill on the porch. Here, on a Saturday evening in May, 10 strangers gather for the Hem & Her supper club, a culinary endeavor from the mind and palate of chef Santana Hem.
“This is a way to showcase what I grew up eating and my relationship with my mom and food,” Hem says. “English being her second language, we really didn’t have a relationship communicating like normal families do; it was more through helping her out in the kitchen.”
Hem says he learned to cook traditional Cambodian food intuitively, without recipes or measuring cups, instead from long, quiet hours by his mother’s side.
Hem’s mother, Vichheka, fled the Pol Pot regime in the ’80s, immigrating to Springfield in Northern Virginia from Cambodia. As a young family, Hem says they rarely ate at restaurants. His mother preferred her own cooking, and, he adds, she always found ways to share her food with others. For her granddaughter’s first birthday, Vichheka went to work with a cooler full of wrappers, mung bean noodles, shrimp and pork and sat at her desk methodically rolling egg rolls until there were a thousand to bring to the party.
Hem, whose extended family includes dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins, has his own experience cooking for large numbers — he laughs recalling how his mother conscripted him to grill 500 beef skewers for his own graduation party from Virginia Tech. Both the spring rolls and the beef skewers are in regular rotation at the pop-ups, though now in smaller quantities.
Growing up, Hem says there were cultural and language barriers separating him from his mother. It was food — the ingredients, flavors and techniques of her homeland — that connected them. But cooking professionally was never the plan, at least not from his mother’s perspective. “The whole goal was for me to have an easy life, but of course, I chose to work in restaurants,” recalls Hem, who cooked at Momofuku Ssäm Bar and Marta in New York. “When I told her I wanted to cook, of course she was not too excited about that. But as she’s seen what I’ve done over the years, she’s like, ‘Oh, you should make this!’ She’s excited to share food through me.”
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Amok trey (curry steamed red snapper)
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Muk mee (crispy puffed rice noodles with Khmer pork ragu)
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Sach ko tuk prahok (grilled bavette steak and fermented fish and eggplant)
The dishes of Hem’s pop-up, which launched in 2022, are versions of Khmer classics filtered through the lens of his childhood — bok lahong, a green papaya salad with dried shrimp and peanuts, or crispy pork and shrimp spring rolls, known as tuh yawh. “Every time I think of a menu, I like to have something that I know everyone will enjoy, whether it’s egg rolls or a chicken stew,” Hem explains. “That way people have a familiar flavor, and then I like to intertwine new things with flavors or ideas people have never heard of or had before.”
While Hem says he prefers to hide out in the kitchen, his wife, Casey Forman, handles the front of the house (in this case, literally the front of their house). “She is definitely better at driving conversations and getting people to talk, which is highly needed in our style of events,” Hem says, though he comes out to explain each course throughout the meal.
While Hem & Her dinners are somewhat sporadic, the goal is to host at least one event a month. In August, Hem & Her will host a supper club, in addition to a pop-up at Second Bottle Wine and Snack Shop that will feature menu items paired with selections from Second Bottle owner Erin Keene. For updates about upcoming events, follow Hem & Her online at hemandherfood.com or @hemandherfood on Instagram.
