Restaurants – Page 2 – Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

Bopha Devi, Melbourne

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.

Victoria St. Melbourne: Known unknowns

There is good food everywhere if you know how to look. Everyone already knows where to look. In Melbourne, where food rates as much of local obsession as the queer Australian code of football or being better than Sydney at everything (apart from being queer), the chances of finding a ‘hidden gem’ amongst the restaurants is unlikely. The real challenge is finding the best dishes within the known areas. The known unknowns, in modern anti-guerrilla warfare parlance.

Victoria Street in Richmond is one of the Melbournes’s pre-eminent Vietnamese hubs. It’s packed full of food that puts much of Ho Chi Minh City’s best to shame and it isn’t near as hard to find. Your best bets for most of the restaurants are to eat the foods that are named on the front windows of the store. They’re displaying them so prominently for a reason.

Fresh Indochinese herbage! Top row: Thai basil (xang hum), rice paddy herb (maom), fishwort (poel trei). Bottom row: Possibly celery (? Feel free to out-guess me, botanists).

Amongst the crowded Vina strip there are a handful of dedicated pho restaurants serving nothing but beef and chicken soups, most notably a second outlet of the Footscray-based Hung Vuong and Pho Dzung.

I was most tempted by Pho Dzung because a few evenings earlier when I dropped by with a vegetarian friend only to find that the single dish that they could conceive that contained no meat was a fried egg on plain rice. The notion that vegetarianism is weird and foreign suggests that this is just like the real Vietnam.

Pho Dzung’s pho bo tai (A$6, small bowl, above) is a carnivore’s delight. The silky smooth broth breathes pure meat. The tai, thin slices of raw beef that warm through in the broth, couldn’t be much juicier. A few doors down at the grocer, there are a huge assortment of deep-fried snacks that I tend to associate with Cambodia rather than its most hated enemy.

The num anksom cheik (A$2), which in Phnom Penh can be conveniently found in front of the Chinese Embassy on Mao Tse Toung Blvd, comes chopped, smothered in tinned coconut milk and with a complimentary plastic spork. Not quite fresh from the barbecue but still a good (and previously unknown) find.

The case of the disappearing beer

Karakuchi! Thanks again to corruption, the Cambodian Government’s coffers have been left super dry.

Millions of bottles and cans of beer imported from Singapore and Thailand simply disappeared at the Cambodian border before being taxed, the Economic Institute of Cambodia (EIC) said in a report commissioned by two local breweries, Cambrew and Cambodia Brewery Limited.

“With weak governance and law enforcement, ‘contraband’ beer has … been booming,” the EIC said, adding that the smuggled brew accounted for 29 per cent of the country’s total beer market, far outstripping legal imports at 6 per cent.

The EIC says the Japanese beer Asahi, the cheapest foreign brand on the market, made-up the largest percentage of imported beer.

One of the strangest things about Asahi Super Dry in Cambodia is that Chinese-, Thai- and Japanese-brewed Asahi all make it onto the market at exactly the same price (around $9.50 per case). You can tell the difference between the Japanese and the other two before you taste them because the Japanese version has three rings in the lip of the can, as seen in figure 1 below, and the real thing will occasionally have Japanese promotional stickers on the cases and individual cans.

Figure 1 – Know your contraband beer

See: Cambodia losing millions to beer smuggling

Won’t you take me to funky town?

Traditional whipping boy of the Cambodian expat dining scene, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, has hired Clinton Webber as new Group Executive Chef to overhaul its menu.

“It’s going to be a whole new thing,” says Webber. “There’s going to be lots of fusion and touches of Khmer cuisine. The emphasis is on being more funky. Think funky, rustic fusion.”

When I think funky, rustic fusion, I think of George Clinton playing a banjo.

See: FCC

Amokalypse Now: Khmer Surin

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.

It’s grim up north

Its undoubtedly the liveliest and most popular Korean restaurant in town. Packed for lunch and dinner, the Pyongyang Restaurant is famous not only for its cold noodles and barbecue served with kim chi, but also for its talented wait staff, which when not serving are dancing to traditional Korean tunes played on violins and electric piano.

But the Pyongyang Restaurant in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh is no ordinary Korean eatery. For one, it’s owned and run by the North Korean government, a capitalist enterprise that sends its profits directly to state coffers in Pyongyang.

Asia Times’ Bertil Lintner covers the geopolitical implications of Phnom Penh’s weirdest food attraction: the North Korean-owned and run Pyongyang Restaurant. This seems to be the only Cambodian eatery that plays the food-as-propaganda angle, and does a roaring trade attracting South Koreans into its razor-wired compound. Not much mention of the food but plenty of juicy political tidbits to make it worthwhile.

See: Asia Times’ Dining with the Dear Leader

Phnom Penh delivery menus: Antisocial expatriates rejoice!

Fresh from the Ministry of “I wish I’d thought of this first” , Cambodia Pocket Guide has just made every housebound expats’ dreams a reality and started publishing delivery menus for their various advertisers around Phnom Penh.

Current online offerings include:

Alley Cat Cafe ("Western"/Mexican) – Much to the dismay of my arteries, I heartily recommend their chilli cheese fries and their (nondelivery) Tuesday night ribs.
Chez Dim (pizza)
FCC (Burgers, "tapas", "Cambodian", pizzas)
Fresco (Sandwiches, salads, coffee, smoothies) – my review
Garden Center Cafe (Western, vegetarian)
Java Cafe (Sandwiches, meat, burgers)
La Volpaia (Italian)
Lemongrass (Thai)
Luna d’autunno (Italian)
Open Wine (Wine, "meat")
Shanghai (Western, thai, and grill)
Sharky (Tex mex, burgers, Thai)
The Deli (Bakery, breakfast, sandwiches)
The Shop (Cakes, breakfast, sandwiches)

Cambodia’s Yellow Pages also contains a food delivery section – only the first thirty or so listings marked with a star have menus for take away/delivery.

The pornography of tropical ice cream.

Ice cream in the tropics is pornographic. There is a moral wrongness about consummating your lather of hot season sweat with something cold and creamy. It’s a fleeting pleasure riddled with First World guilt. What’s more it’s for sale, quite openly, on the streets of Phnom Penh. Presumably, ice cream arrived in Phnom Penh with the French colonisers and has since become popular with the colonised as a street food (which I have covered previously in both a microbiological and more sociological sense). What has changed within the past year is the opening of a handful of upmarket establishments, pimping their rich flavours to richer Phnom Penhois.

Fanny at Open Wine

Any locals fearing a Vietnamese invasion be warned: advance troops have been sent to pervert the local population with their seductive iced treats. While the name may refer to an Australian slang term for female genitalia, Fanny is actually an offshoot of a well-established Saigon ice creamery rather than a more disreputable local establishment selling their namesake. Painted in the same mustard palette as their partner over the border with the same menu and wrought iron furniture, the only concession to Cambodian preferences seems to be the covert removal of any reference to Vietnam from the marketing collateral. Their garden seating area looks a little worse for wear by day, but classier by night when the fairy light bedecked palm lights up.

With twelve flavours of ice cream on offer and eight sorbets (including local seasonal flavours of passionfruit, durian and mango), I was only left with one choice: order the ice cream modelled into the shape of a cyclo (US$3.50). After a short negotiation with my assigned waitress, it was revealed that a vital component to the dish, the slices of orange for the wheels, had run out, so I settled for a much more prosaic scoop of mint and dark chocolate (pictured above). The mint had an industrial mint essence quality and contained the ice crystal warning signs of being defrosted then refrozen; the dark chocolate was foamy, fatty and mousseline.

Price: $0.75 per small scoop

Location: In Open Wine, Street 19 just north of the Street 240 corner. Open Wine also has a magic barbecue that transmutes animal flesh into timber: if you’re planning to eat there, pair your wines with ice cream. However, their meat-centric antipasto platter is a great accompaniment to a celebratory bottle of brut de brut.

Bong Karem

Bong Karem is a welcome newcomer to the Street 240 tourist strip because unlike practically every venue on that street, the food is outstanding. Sixteen flavours of gelati taunt you at the front counter and Karem will offer custom flavours to larger orders. I foresee a bold future for personally designing Kampot pepper, fresh turmeric and galangal gelato. The small shopfront lacks seating which is a huge drawback in hot season when you’ll be left with a fistful of sticky cream within minutes of exiting the store.

Bong Karem’s cones are fresh and they pad out their local fruit range with rarer imported flavours such as hazelnut. I hit my personal gelato favourite (cocco) which entrapped the refreshing tartness of green coconut milk with a few slivers of desiccated flesh mixed throughout, and the matching ciocolata (chocolate) was fully rounded with a slightly grainy cocoa mouthfeel.

Price: $1 per scoop

Location: #57Eo, Street 240 (map)

Vergers D’Angkor

Vergers D’Angkor is a hotel/restaurant supplier and Cambodia’s oldest artisanal ice cream producer, but doesn’t have a parlour befitting of its own product. Their dark chocolate (pictured) was more anorexic than Karem’s or Fanny’s and had suffered a little in storage at Comme Ã la Maison’s small delicatessen. When I find a fresher punnet, I will do them the justice of a better review.

Price: $3 for a 250gm punnet.

Location: Available from Comme Ã la Maison, #13, Street 57.

Real Khmer? Cambodian fine dining in Phnom Penh

“I hope I’m not going to wake up to that tomorrow morning”, Austin mentioned as I took the above photo.

Good morning, Austin.

I spent last weekend with Austin from RealThai while he crafts a piece for a Thai newspaper about Phnom Penh as a weekend destination, and takes photos in a manner much more professional than mine. He was keen on me showing him some of the less fluffy edges of Cambodian food (see pig parts, above, from Psar Orussei) that we could use for our own purposes. It is always a pleasure to travel about Phnom Penh with a fresh set of eyes and compare notes on respective adopted nations’ cuisines. Austin has an encyclopedic knowledge of Thai food, whereas my knowledge of Khmer cuisine is much more like an 1880’s Children’s Primer: One part shipping tables; one part unverifiable observation; three parts Tales of Interest in Foreign Lands. When Austin invited me along to provide local insights into Phnom Penh’s top end at the restaurants’ expense, how could I refuse? I consulted my shipping tables to check my availability with the tides.

Chef Luu Meng from Malis was a genuine surprise. Since I had last eaten at Malis about six months ago, Luu Meng had tweaked the menu to add some homier Khmer food (a few basic, herb-rich soups) and altered the street-level layout to look a little classier with a paintjob, fewer tables and some deep couches.

Meng spoke at length on the primacy of freshness, the importance of the Mekong’s rise and fall to affect the seasonal growth of local herbs and the migration of Cambodian freshwater fish. He devoted twenty minutes to speaking on the flavour profile of th’noeng leaf which he describes broadly as somewhere between “green mango and tamarind”, and the huge difference between maom leaf (“Vietnamese!”) and ma-aum leaf (basil’s lovechild with spearmint). He spoke about being excited about Indian food and about weaning his staff from their previous MSG habits (none is used in his kitchen).

In between chatting we ate a handful of journo-friendly plates : fish amok, kroueng-coated chicken wings, local scallops with pepper (pictured above), and beef in bamboo. Most hit the more Chinese end of Khmer cuisine – Luu Meng is a man who wholeheartedly embraces the capsicum.

Night was reserved for the Khmer degustation menu at Raffles Hotel Le Royal’s fine dining effort, Restaurant Le Royal. After chatting with Luu Meng, I was openly optimistic about the direction that this New Khmer Cuisine was taking in Phnom Penh. I had also previously eaten a seriously good bowl of pho at a conference buffet at Le Royal but never set foot in their fine dining area.

Jan, our maÃ®tre d’hotel/sommelier, described the menu, suggested wines, and was an altogether ideal host. European wines are not my strong point: I’ve got a decent grip on varietals but come from a background of drinking too many tannin-heavy Aussie reds, some of which from a box rather than a bottle. He made one of the best wine/food pairings that I’ve had in Cambodia. After describing Southern German terroir with glee, he picked a 2005 Wittmann Estate Riesling which was acidic but with sweetness on the back palate that fits perfectly with both the richer and subtly spicy elements of Khmer food. The nose of peaches was clear enough to bring back my grim memories of working in a central Victorian orchard, memories that in hindsight I should have appreciated as a small omen.

The trio of starters was locally inspired, only in the loosest sense. The pared-down mango salad contained chopped capsicum instead of chilli, dried shrimps mashed to a fine paste rather than whole with no real seafood punch. This was accompanied by two slices of West Coast scallops on triangle of banana leaf and a pair of wonton parcels with hoi sin sauce. I’m a fan of when chef’s pay attention to texture, which was evident, but the salad was pared back to being barely recognizable as Khmer, and the other two components could have come from literally anywhere.

I questioned our waiter in Khmer as to whether the forthcoming Pumpkin Soup was Samlor Karko, a Hindu-influenced Khmer soup which amongst other ingredients, contains pumpkin.

“No”, he answered, “It’s samlor lapov” : quite literally “Soup Pumpkin” followed by a grin.

There is a grin of nervousness in Cambodia. Ask a local about the current regime, the Khmer Rouge, or their dead parents and you’ll get the same grin. For a Westerner, there is nothing more unnerving than having a local describe their tales of torture and terror under the Khmer Rouge whilst they give you an unflinching and toothy smile. I hoped that the nervousness was more about the service staff suddenly realising that I could understand them a little when they were musing in Khmer about the sexuality of two young white men eating together by candlelight, rather than about the soup. I was tempted to confirm with them that Austin actually was my alluring Thai songsaa*.

The pureed pumpkin soup arrived topped with a square of gold leaf. It bore no resemblance to Khmer food, just as my bleak peach harvest memories bore no relationship to my continued enjoyment of the riesling. As a curious coincidence, I’d left my inamorata (who now wishes to be referred to as such in print and in person) at home defrosting herself a bowl of pumpkin soup from the freezer which she’d previously packed full of fresh Khmer ginger, lemongrass and coconut. It was the last aroma that I could smell when I left my house and now I longed for that soup rather than the one in front of me.

Between soup and mains, the Rosicrucian-ly named Executive Chef Christian Rose devoted us a half hour of his time. He spoke guardedly about Khmer food choices and regarded us with slight suspicion when we asked about sourcing local ingredients, about local Cambodian restaurants (his recommendations: Khmer Surin, Malis, beachside seafood in Sihanoukville), and about the interest of his guests in Khmer cuisine. There appeared to be very little interest despite his assurances to the contrary.

Scattered amongst the conversation, he name-dropped his upmarket ingredients and recipes: West Coast scallops; beluga caviar; Wagyu beef (“Grade 9, not Japanese but with excellent marbling”); a multiple course duck degustation; an entire constellation of foods alien to the Cambodian culinary cosmos. This was the food of international excess, high diplomacy and hardcore local corruption. Does serving this food in a starving nation make you complicit? Does eating it? The mains arrived to break our conversation before I got the chance to head it in a lachrymose direction.

The following beef loc lac hit the right note: beef (not a cut of Wagyu, which would be a foolish excess), fresh pepper from Kurata Pepper, stock reduction – completely unlike your regular loc lac which is generally made with bottled soy and tomato sauce : and so a positive top-end innovation. This was paired with a miscellaneous coconut curry with a hearty chunk of fresh bawngkang (river lobster) tail meat, a few batons of vegetable matter and a minute mound of rice. Desserts were a wide selection of Khmer sweets and I caused a small commotion when I asked the waiter to name a more obscure one (I thought num lhong, but it was revealed to be the similarly shaped num bhor por).

We rolled out of Le Royal after four hours of well-paced food conversation, great wine and barely Cambodian food.

Meals and wine at Restaurant Le Royal and Malis were provided free of charge. Malis is located on Norodom Blvd, just south of the Independence Monument. Restaurant Le Royal is located in Raffles Hotel Le Royal on the corner of St.92 and Monivong Blvd. Enter via the main foyer and turn left.

Nouveau Pho de Paris

Should I expect a cheese plate? Pho Bo(cuse)? French onion soup with noodles? These are questions that have weighed heavily on my mind in the two odd years that I have been passing by Nouveau Pho de Paris on Monivong boulevard, Phnom Penh. Both Cambodian and Vietnamese foods have successfully integrated their former colonial ruler’s nosh in a way that makes it seem natural, but you should not fool with pho. It is one of the world’s perfect street foods like pizza, burritos, souvlaki or laksa. Like all of these dishes, there are defined limits within which there is plenty of room for play. There is no room in pho for nouveau Parisians.

Judging from the photos displayed under the glass-topped tables, the Nouveau’s menu seemed to contain a random array of Chinese, Vietnamese and Khmer foods with no obvious reference to anything French. The lunchtime crowd may have had a Parisian fresh from the Sorbonne amongst them though: my waiter was confused as to my lingua franca and opened in French to which I parried with Khmer. He returned with a fine and unexpected play in English. Unable to answer with anything witty or Vietnamese, I ordered the pho bo without checking out their menu. The atmosphere was certainly more rarefied than your average pho stall: air con; real wooden chairs; and Cambodia’s velvet Elvis equivalent, lurid paintings of Angkor Wat.

NP de P’s pho rated fairly well on the meat index with a hearty selection of cow parts : some corned beef, sliced stomach and tendon, and a pair of suspiciously buoyant beef balls. On the opposing herb front: basil, saw mint, bean shoots were provided in abundance on the side. A pile of weedy local coriander and both spring and white onions were already added to the soup. Noodles were wide and commercial and the stock was muscular and sweet but not hugely complex.

One mid-size bowl of nouveau pho de boeuf: US$1.50, tea gratis.

Location: #26Eo, Monivong Blvd, Phnom Penh