BENGALURU: It may be a new restaurant in town but Khmer Kitchen in JP Nagar is a familiar landmark for South Bengalureans who know it as ‘Karnada Ganapthy’. The food joint was formerly a home nestled in greenery, with a library housing several books and a garden courtyard where late writer Girish Karnad spent several years. Now, the restaurant brings alive Siem Reap with its Asian-styled sculptures, a waterfall and koi pond. The erstwhile home of Karnad has now been turned into the Cambodian restaurant Khmer Kitchen, which offers South-East Asian dishes.
Karnad’s son, Raghu Karnad, tells CE that he did a walk-through of the space a couple of days before its intended launch in December. “It’s a trip. I loved that they haven’t cut down any trees, and the structure of the house is unchanged, so its an uncanny transformation from the dusty, bookish home I grew up in to a low-lit trendy Angkor Wat,” says Raghu.
He recalls how his mother, Dr Saraswathi Ganapathy, practically built that house herself, and their family lived there for about 25 years starting from 1994, before moving to central Bengaluru. “When we moved out, we spent a lot of time weighing different, solemn options for the house. I love how un-pompous the final outcome has been. And unexpected,” he adds.
It was sometime in 2018 that Naveen Reddy’s (managing partner of the restaurant) wife Veena (partner of the restaurant) wanted to start an Asian-style cafe. It so happened that Reddy was in Cambodia at that point. “I loved the food and ended up going to Cambodia at least eight times to learn the finer-details of Cambodian cooking – making rice noodles or garden cooking. We also collaborated with chefs like Kethana Dunnet, author of Cookin’ Cambodian, who taught Gordon Ramsay (celebrity British chef) how to make Fish Amok,” he says, adding that he also closely worked with chef Nak before opening the place to the public.
As an architect, Reddy’s first instinct was to retain the greenery as is. “The structure itself was a challenge to restore. We’ve tried to maintain every branch of the trees. It was interesting to use the old form and fuse the old and new together, along with the trees that became a part of the concept itself,” says Reddy,
who has leased the property from a friend to whom the house was sold to in 2018. “We finalised things sometime in 2019 and have been working on it ever since,” says Reddy about the 3,000 sq ft space that has now been doubled. “Only the sloped Mangalore tile roof of Karnad’s home was dismantled,” he adds.
As an ode to Karnad, the library at Khmer Kitchen has been retained in its original location, where children are encouraged to engage themselves reading. “The private dining rooms also retain the original terracotta filler slab roof that adorn the ceiling, while overlooking the garden court yard below,” he adds.