Gong Garden
When Sarom Heng-Calanni moved to Fredonia from her native country of Cambodia in 2001, she started planting flowers. “I didn’t even know they were edible,” she says. “They just made me happy.” Today these flowers—among them peppery nasturtium and herbaceous borage—are an integral part of the dishes that Heng-Calanni creates year-round for her business Gong Garden.
She employs them as the visual centerpiece of her stunningly beautiful, fresh spring rolls. She carefully places them in every cold noodle salad she makes, atop the vegetables she and her husband Peter Calanni grow in their gardens and greenhouses. Seemingly effortlessly, she arranges them in splendent bouquets, instinctively combining colors and scents and textures.
The flowers add flavor and visual intrigue, but more than that, they embody the care that Heng-Calanni puts into everything she creates. While Gong Garden’s food is fresh, healthy and unique, it’s this palpable care that attracts customers throughout the year to the Fredonia Farmers’ Market, and brings them back each summer to the Bester Plaza Market in Chautauqua.
This simple flourish is also emblematic of Heng-Calanni and her husband’s life—a life that has grown naturally from simple beginnings, all the while maintaining heart and a sense of place.
Heng-Calanni was born in Cambodia shortly after the Khmer Rouge’s violent and devastating reign from 1975 to 1979. Her family lived in poverty, sustaining themselves by farming rice and foraging wild edibles. An appreciation for things wild and overlooked, and a commitment to never letting anything go to waste, remains with Heng-Calanni today, who obsessively uses and preserves nearly every part of everything they grow.
“Our freezers are never empty,” laughs her husband.
Sarom and Peter met in 1996, while Peter was teaching English in Cambodia. They married in 1999, and in 2001 moved back to Fredonia, where they’ve raised son Tenzin and daughter Shaanti, born in 2000 and 2004, respectively. The family originally resided in a 440-square-foot house on the two-and-a-half-acre property they still live on today, which Calanni tended with a friend in the early 1990s. They’ve since expanded their tiny house into a modest home, surrounded with ample decks.
When I visit in September, Gong Garden’s vegetables are still thriving in the abating fall light. There are tomatoes of all sizes, shapes and colors, including a variety that they brought back from Calanni’s ancestors’ property in Sicily a few years ago, a speckled, forest green Cambodian squash from seeds given to them by Cambodian friends in Philadelphia, and tiny Mexican cucumbers that look like miniature watermelons. Interspersed are Heng-Calanni’s beloved flowers and other striking edibles, like red amaranth.
Calanni tells me that when he started farming in the early '90s, he favored traditional rows, but that his wife was inclined towards a wilder approach, which happened to be in line with the teachings of one of Calanni’s influences, innovative Japanese farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. “Now everything is intermixed—and we find it works better,” Calanni says.
On the surrounding land, they’ve built tiny little paradises everywhere: a papasan chair beneath a blue spruce tree, a couple of comfy rattan chairs near a firepit, a hammock, its bright colors softened from use. But when I ask Heng-Calanni her favorite place to relax, she laughs, responding, “I don’t like to sit down.”
She channels this energy into harvesting 1,000 bulbs of garlic in the summer, making 400 to 500 spring rolls weekly for each summer market, perfectly chopping and julienning the carrots and cucumbers in her vegetarian sushi, saving thousands of seeds throughout the season, and preserving vegetables for use in the soups Gong Garden sells all winter.
Over the last couple of decades, they have witnessed customers’ palates expanding, with the internationally-influenced dishes that were exotic when they started now coming into demand. Today, Gong Garden’s menu includes chicken kebobs, steamed buns, salsa, hummus, pesto and five frozen soups.
“We have people who come and buy meals for the whole week, because they know it’ll be fresh,” Calanni says.
Their most popular dishes are the Pad Thai and the cold noodle salad, Heng-Calanni’s superior take on a Vietnamese vermicelli bowl.
This winter, Heng-Calanni hopes to start offering cooking classes in Gong Garden's NY state agriculture and market certified kitchen, in response to community demand.
“We’re just so grateful that people like the food,” Calanni says, overcome with pride in his wife’s talents and all that she has accomplished. “We just never could have imagined the response would be this enthusiastic.”
