Queen’s Deli may be the most attractive storefront on White Center’s 14th Avenue, a street where auto-body shops and strip malls alternate with strings of bungalows surrounded by chain-link fences. The deli shares a roof with one of those mini-markets whose success seems to depend on sales of calling cards and cigarettes. But with the deli’s salmon-colored exterior and brand-new sign, it’s the pretty head of the conjoined twins. If your standards are calibrated so high that a good paint job won’t make you pull over to take a closer look at the place, perhaps the printout taped to the window will. It says, simply, “Phnom Penh Noodles.”
White Center, one of the most interesting neighborhoods in the area if your taste in food runs to the cheap and piquant, is also the heart of Seattle’s Khmer community. The neighborhood is big enough to support three or four specialty markets, the offices of the Khmer-language newspaper, the Cambodian Cultural Alliance of Washington, and the Cambodian New Year’s festival—but nary a full-service restaurant, until now. And Queen’s Deli isn’t exactly a full-service restaurant. I’ve eaten there three times, and each time my friends and I have been the only occupied table for most of the meal, though a third of the tables around us have displayed the unexcavated remains of the parties who preceded us.
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