Category: Khmer

I’ve been reticent about reviewing Cambodian wedding cuisine because regardless of how tenuous my link is to the happy couple, I’m still wary of reviewing private events lest friends stop inviting me to their houses to sample their attempts at cooking and imbibe their booze. If you spend any length of time in Cambodia, you’ll attend a wedding. They tend to be massive affairs held either in the gargantuan reception warehouses dotted around Phnom Penh or in a tent in the middle of the street, in front of a relative’s house. Knowing the bride or groom is not a prerequisite to being invited.

Cambodian wedding food constitutes a whole genre of its own and much like the wedding ceremony, it tends to draw on an array of foreign influences. In Phnom Penh, it’s not uncommon to have a Western-style, towering wedding cake, Thai tom yam soup, Chinese stir frys and a bottle of imported whiskey all at the same meal. Regardless of the food, the format of the meal is prescribed: set tables of ten (or eight in Sihanoukville*) are served as soon as they are seated. If your group is smaller than ten, random strangers will join your table or else you can join theirs as food will not be served until your table is full.

First comes a set of pickles and amusé (for lack of a better word), which in the past has included steamed pigs’ ears, cashew nuts, pickled vegetables, spring rolls, faux meats, and once, slices of Spam. A soup and a few mains follow that are shared by the whole table. The mains depend on the budget of the wedding, ranging from langoustine or whole steamed fish to stir-fried offal.

When I was in Tbaeng Meanchey in Cambodia’s north for a night, the only restaurant in town, Darareah, was booked out for a wedding. So instead of harassing the overstretched kitchen into cooking us something else, we ordered the wedding food.

Round 1: Mustard pickles

These were some of the best Cambodian pickles I’ve ever eaten. Very simple garlic, chilli and mustard-y green. This far north in Cambodia, there is more of a preference for chilli-hot foods and the liberal use of chilli serves this pickle no disrespect.

Round 2: Stir-fried mixed vegetables with rehydrated pork skin.

The purpose of rehydrated pork skin is a mystery. After it is removed from the pig, the skin is deep-fried into thin sheets and then rehydrated when the mood takes you. It adds practically no pork flavour to anything and tends to lurk at the bottom of Cambodian soups and stir-frys, surprising diners with the mouthfeel equivalent of stepping on a beached jellyfish. Cauliflower turns up in the strangest parts of Cambodia and this place is no stranger.

Round 3: Stir-fried pipes with pepper and sugar

Sweet, sweet offal candy! Along with watery sour soup and stirfried morning glory, this dish is one of the staples of Cambodian village travel. I’m not sure what one of the parts in this intestine stir-fry is, but I do know it comes from a pig. The other parts come from a pepper tree, sugar cane and the industrial glutamate factories of Ajinomoto.

Round 4: Tom Yam soup

The more time I spend travelling South East Asia, the more that I’m convinced that tom yam soup is becoming the South East Asian equivalent of pizza, a food that has become detached from its point of origin to become a regionally-specific genre of its own, for example Malaysian tom yam. This close to the Thai border however, Khmer tom yam is indistinguishable from Thai tom yam nam khon.

Location: Darareah Restaurant, next to the roundabout in Tbaeng Meanchey, Preah Vihear province. If you’re visiting the Preah Vihear ruins from the Cambodian side, you’ll inevitably eat there as dining options in the town are limited.

* – At an event with some coworkers in Sihanoukville, I asked why there were only eight seats per table in this province and ten in other provinces. ‘It’s lucky’ they answered. ‘It’s lucky because in Sihanoukville, we get to eat more food.’

I’d started my day with a heartening trip down Victoria Street in Richmond: noodle soup breakfast; harassing local Vietnamese grocers for Khmer ingredients; and an unexpected and typically Cambodian street food snack. There exists a good potential to cook ‘authentic’ Cambodian food in Melbourne. You’d need a hook up into the underground Cambodian expat network so that you could secure the correct dried and fermented fishes, but apart from that, almost all the right ingredients are there, some of which are fresher than those that you’d see in your average Cambodian market. I had been trying to lower my expectations when approaching Bopha Devi, Melbourne’s sole Cambodian restaurant in the inner city, but the signs on Victoria Street had put me in a positive mood.

Bopha Devi has had a fistful of favourable reviews in the Melbourne food press. If you hadn’t already gathered, this isn’t going to be one of them.

The fish amok (A$26.90, US$21.50) was an exercise in disillusionment. It bore a basic resemblance to fish amok in that it contained some sort of fish and a banana leaf. Apart from that I would hazard a guess that the other two ingredients were Mae Ploy brand green Thai curry paste and a full can of coconut cream. When you’re charging this much for an amok and have all the ingredients at your disposal only kilometres away, there really isn’t any excuse for obliterating the soul of the dish.

Somlah Machou Kroueng with Fish (A$18.90) had the slightest touch of lemongrass and sour tamarind water but could more correctly be labelled ‘onion and capsicum soup’, as could the Char Kroueng (A$18.90) be labelled ‘onion and capsicum soup, hold the soup’. The rubbery tofu versions of each made me sorry for the vegetarians on my table; more sorry than I am that they miss out on the glory of bacon.

I was hoping that the Beef Salad (plear sach ko, A$15.90) would come marinated in lime juice, jam-packed with sliced lemongrass and raw, as it does when one throws caution to the wind and opens their intestinal tract to parasites in Cambodia. It didn’t. Dried Shrimp Salad (A$13.90) had desiccated shrimp aplenty and masses of shredded carrot which hid a scant few slivers of white vegetable that may have been the advertised green papaya but by this stage, I was feeling too jaded to ask.

The interior was pleasantly haute-Asian: red lanterns, muted but tasteful wallpaper, a Russian Market antiquity on one wall, footstool-sized cube seating that the Herald-Sun’s Stephen Downes complained about. The staff were welcoming although I’m unsure whether to lay the blame on the staff or on the chef that our waiter had to visit the kitchen when I asked if anything contained prahok, Cambodia’s national fish condiment. Nothing did.

In Cambodia, Princess Bopha Devi is best known for being the former King Sihanouk’s wayward daughter. Educated as a ballerina in France, the princess emulated the other princes by taking a succession of beautiful lovers but unlike the princes, this was much to the dismay of Sihanouk who once labelled her a ‘whore‘. It makes for an interesting choice of name for a restaurant: Cambodians would more likely associate Bopha Devi with Sihanouk’s comments or her more recent political career as Minister for Culture. If the food had been better, I’d rant about the clash of feminism, modernity and tradition that the name embodies, and the difficulties of reconciling a modern education with the demands of Cambodian royal life. But it wasn’t.

Location: 27 Rakaia Way, New Quay, Melbourne (Australia). www.bophadevi.com.

Located in the middle of NGO-infested suburb Boeung Keng Kang 1, Khmer Surin restaurant has started to accept tourists by the busload. For anyone living locally looking to lunch on a lazy amok, this is as bad news as my ham-fisted attempts at alliteration. The huge villa seats patrons over three levels and while the second floor boasts the nicest furnishings, the best tables are on the top floor where you can rail against the Gods in their full view for not providing an evening breeze. Be sure to sit away from the edge of roof on a rainy night.

While the surrounds are fancy pants, the service can be burlap sack on a slow night. One evening the waiter responsible for our floor decided to take off his shirt and have a nap in the corner suggesting that he already knew that Australians have appalling record at tipping. On many nights Khmer Surin provides a traditional Khmer band to keep its employees awake, which to my uncultured Western ears sounds as romantic as playing a marimba with a live weasel. If you live in Cambodia, you get enough traditional music anytime there is a wedding in your suburb. The common practice for Cambodian weddings is to have a tent set up out the front of the happy couple’s house, serve 300 of your closest friends a few Chinese-Khmer meals and play about eight hours of Khmer traditional music at ear-bleed levels. This is only punctuated by monks, who say “hello hello hello hello hello hello” into the microphone at 4:30am and then rock the mike with seven hours of groaning in Pali, a language that few Khmer folk understand or enjoy. Come to think of it, I haven’t met any Khmer people with a pure love of traditional music either.

Surin gets top marks for nontraditional presentation. Their fish amok arrives on a divot-filled plate with 7 individual servings of the curry that challenges you to play a clever game wherein you battle your tablemates for the final nugget of fish. I was going to call the game ‘Hungry Hungry Subsistence Farmers’, but it doesn’t really have much of a ring to it when I write it down. The sad part is that this amok is all bling and no substance. It’s the MC Hammer of fish curries (minus the later career as a celebrity judge on Dance Fever and his current career as a blogger). Relatively heavy on the lime leaves, shredded chili and MSG but otherwise pared down to a very minimal spice blend, coconut and a small amount of yesterday’s fish, served cold.

Location: #9 Street 57, Phnom Penh. Fish amok, US$3.50.