Category: Restaurants

Food away from home

Midday Mee Mamak Mission

Mee Mamak at Mamaks Corner

Most workers in Phnom Penh get a two hour lunch break from twelve until two. The thought of scoffing down a cheap sandwich while hunched over a keyboard is literally unthinkable for most Phnom Penhois, not for the least reason that most Cambodians don’t work on computers nor do they enjoy the charm of sliced bread.

Two hours allows time for a multiple course meal and a snooze, and for me, plenty of time to obsess about what to eat for lunch and then immediately write about it. A few days ago, Robyn from EatingAsia went on a road trip to hunt down an excellent mee mamak, a Malaysian fried noodle dish that would be the likely result of Kerala meeting Guangdong in Penang for a food fight. I’ve been thinking about having it for lunch ever since and so headed for Mamak’s Corner, an Indian-Muslim Malaysian restaurant that I’ve been recommended previously.

Mee Mamak

I wanted to be smacked around by chili heat in the mee mamak and arrive back at the office two hours later, still shaking and wide-eyed from the endorphin rush. This mee was light on the heat and lacked the curry flavors, potato, and red onion that mark it as a food that came from the Malaysian intermixture of Chinese and Indian cultures. A few smallish prawns and squid slices provided the meat component. I was a little let down, but I’m not going to write off Mamak’s Corner after eating only one dish there – the 100% Malaysian crowd at lunchtime indicates that there must be some excellent dining secrets hidden somewhere between its menu and bain marie.

$2 for a plate.

Location: Deceptively, Mamak’s Corner is not on a corner. It’s on St.114 near the corner of St.61. Mamak’s is halal.

See also: Care For a Side of Diesel Exhaust With Your Noodles? for possibly the world’s greatest mee mamak.

Filipino Food in Cambodia

Of the regional cuisines that I know literally nothing about, Filipino cuisine tops my list. My knowledge of the Philippines has mostly been gleaned from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and the works of seminal turntablists, the Invisibl Skratch Piklz. 100mph Backsliding Turkey Kutz may be one of the canonical scratch weapons that every aspiring hip hop disc jockey should have in their armoury, but it hardly provides much insight into food and culture of the Filipino people. Thankfully, the Internet is filled with people who know that there is more to Pinoy food than Jollibee and are conversely less interested in hip hop marginalia than me. It seems that Filipino expats aren’t too badly served by the Phnom Penh food scene. Toe writes:

In markets and supermarkets, you can buy bagoong, patis, bulalo, kangkong, ampalaya, and others. Probably the only thing you can’t buy here is bangus.

When it comes to restaurants, there is a handful. There is Helen’s Bakery which is a carinderia-style turo-turo where she cooks super-delicious pork chops, ampalaya, Filipino fried chicken, menudo, afritada, pinakbet etc. for about $1.50 per meal. Her tapsilog, longsilog, and tocilog are famous all over Phnom Penh. She also delivers for free. Her carinderia is visited not only by Pinoys but also westerners who like her tacos, potato salad, and pizzas.

Then, there’s Bamboo Restaurant, situated strategically near the Independence Monument. It’s a little bit more elegant than Helen (air-conditioned) and of course a little more expensive… but still quite reasonably priced. They have crispy pata, kaldereta, lumpiang shanghai, sinigang na hipon, pancit bihon and everything else you could think if you’re craving for Filipino food. Their leche flan and halo-halo are to die for.

Locations: Helen’s Bakery is at No. 159B, Norodom Blvd; Bamboo Restaurant is on the strategically important corner of Sihanouk Blvd and St.9.

See Also: kurokuroatbp

Ohan

Running a restaurant aimed at expats in Cambodia requires equal parts audacity and derangement. There seems to have been a recent growth in the number of Japanese restaurants around town, and of all the national cuisines that are replicated in Cambodia, Japanese has one of the greater degrees of difficulty. As a consequence, the restaurants seem to be run by a diverse and occasionally motley crew of Japanese expats who all seem to fit into the categories of audacious or deranged.

The owner of Ohan is definitely at the daring end of the spectrum. I’ve never seen him bedecked in anything but his canary yellow chef’s ensemble. He’s always keen to greet every single patron in the restaurant and when he asks if you’re enjoying your meal, you can tell that he is not asking as a routine social nicety. His moist-eyed look of joy when you answer in the affirmative is the only thing better than the food.

Apart from Iron Chef fashion sense, Ohan’s second audacious factor is the strange location. Although relatively close to most of Phnom Penh’s other Japanese restaurants (Kokoro, Himajin, and Origami), it is next to Cambodia’s worst sandwich vendor, Lucky 7, and opposite the decidedly un-sexy Phnom Penh Centre office buildings. You can only enter the place from the Phnom Penh Centre parking lot side. The external features are nondescript and the inside slightly less so. A few people I know who work in Phnom Penh Centre didn’t know it existed but the people who obviously matter, Japanese expats, have been more attentive because the restaurant is full at lunchtime.

Mackerel at Ohan Phnom Penh Cambodia

The drawcard is the $5 set lunch special. Four choices, each as delicious as the next : pork sukiyaki, mackerel, tempura, and a soba/sushi set. There’s also a few more expensive bento ($7-10) if you have a hankering for something else. Since I’m on the piscatorial bandwagon at the moment, I went for local mackerel. The charred, salty slices of mackerel fillet were crispy without losing the mackerel’s tender oiliness. A potato/egg/mayonnaise salad, pickles, seaweed-heavy bowl of miso, and short-grain rice round out the set. Tea, hot or cold, is complementary.

Ohan has a loyalty card that only serves to remind me that in relative terms, I’ve blown a lot of cash on Ohan since it opened. They made a fatal mistake of offering a few Japanese-loving friends and I free draught beer as an opening special, so we’ve stayed until close a few nights over the past month to test their mettle and the capacity of their kegs of Tiger. The kegs run deep. Their dinner menu is expansive without being overwhelming. In Cambodian terms, it is not cheap. For a sushi/sashimi blowout dinner look to pay about $25 a head, sans sake.

Location: On Sothearos, opposite the Phnom Penh Centre

The Russian Market (Psar Toul Tom Poung)

Assigned its Soviet moniker due to its proclivity for stocking Moscow’s goods during the Cold War, all manner of pirated wares and locally made trinkets now replace Communist comestibles at this crowded, ramshackle bazaar. Instead of being housed in a single building, the Russian Market has mostly grown by a process of agglomeration whereby individual store holders piece together their patch of real estate with sheets of corrugated iron, cut-rate cement, and hubris. The result is mayhem but there is some semblance of organisation thanks to the Khmer tradition of grouping like businesses together.

Psar Toul Tom Poung

The northeast corner is full of Daelim and Honda motorcycle parts and tools, the northern outside edge is fruit (both imported and local), and the northern central section contains meat, veggies and dried foods. There is a band of small fast food vendors through the centre on the western side. Slender alleys of pirated clothes and shoes are on the eastern side and run all the way to the southern end, with a centre section full of cheap tailors. The southernmost edge is pirated DVDs/CDs, software, and tourist t-shirts. The southwest corner is carved paraphernalia and stoneware. Nestled amongst these spontaneous provinces, you’ll also find practically everything else that you’ll want to ship home from Cambodia: crockery, lamps, handbags, silks, jewelry, photocopied books, Buddhist kitsch at prices lower than practically everywhere in Asia.

Prahok and dried fish at Russian Market

As a food destination and much like the above photo, Russian Market is a mixed bag. Thanks to the low zinc-coated ceiling, the dull oppressive heat is your inescapable shopping companion and due to this, the standard of fresh fruit and vegetables is passable if you arrive in the morning and slowly degrades as the day progresses.

The meats of wrath
This little piggy went to market.

Fresh fish at Russian Market, Phnom Penh

For fresh meat and seafood, the produce is generally not of the same quality as the larger Central Market and very little of it is kept on ice. You’ll occasionally be able to cut a good deal for prawns (bawngkia) on ice, live langoustine (bawngkang) or mudcrabs (kdaam) simply because the demand isn’t as high at the Russian Market as it is elsewhere.

Prahok and dried small fish at Russian Market, Phnom Penh

If you’re easily overwhelmed by the smell of fermented and dried aquatic life, then this is not the place for you.

The central group of fast food stalls seems to be the only area where there is a common roof, now stained jet black from years of cooking oil smoke and charcoal fire. By Western standards of hygiene, it looks unreservedly grim, especially as the decaying cooking detritus builds to an olfactory crescendo of putrefaction shortly after lunch. There are a handful of great Khmer meals to be had here that are hard to find in Phnom Penh’s restaurants, a few of which I’ve only ever seen cooked on a mobile cart. One of these is the Khmer version of the Vietnamese pancake, Banh Xeo.

Num Banh Xeo at Russian Market

This banh xeo (2500 riel, US$0.62) was at least a foot long and had enough lettuce, fishwort (chee poel trei) and Vietnamese coriander (chee krassang) to sustain a large warren of rabbits. The egg and rice flour crepe had an almost perfectly crispy, wok-tainted skin and was packed solid with cooked ground pork, whole small-ish prawns and bean shoots. While I had a tough time eating the whole thing, a tiny Khmer woman seated next to me managed to inhale two in quick succession, in a trick akin to stuffing twenty clowns into a comedy Volkswagen. I wanted to ask her if there was anything up her sleeves, but my Khmer just doesn’t stretch that far.

Location:The Russian Market, Cnr St. 155 and St.444, Phnom Penh

Pacharan does Ho Chi Minh

According to the latest FCC Cambodia propaganda, FCC will be spreading their tapas tentacles Saigon-wards with a new Pacharan restaurant in District 1 at 97 Hai Ba Trung. It will be interesting to see if they can clone the success that they’re having in Cambodia in a much tougher and more discerning restaurant market. No firm opening dates as yet.

Previously on Phnomenon: Pacharan review

Chinese Noodles Restaurant

Noodle Goodness at Chinese Noodles Phnom Penh

Cambodian restaurants tend to have a deconstructive approach to their kitchen design. More often than not barbecuing is seperated from the rest of the cooking to keep the smoke at bay, but occasionally there is a tendency to knock it up a notch, and say, wash your dishes in a neighbouring house or cook a single component of your meals off-site at an undisclosed location.

Chinese Noodles have caught on to this postmodern wave. The customer needs to dodge past the noodlemaster (above) and the boiling pots of stock at the front of house to enter, and if they happen to order fried noodles, the fresh noodles from the front are transported to somewhere at the back of the restaurant to get the full wok treatment. Dumplings and tea seems to arrive from all directions.

The restaurant seats about thirty in rickety, lurid red steel chairs. Each table is bedecked in the classic “tablecloth under glass” and has no less than eight plastic bottles of light soy sauce, possibly so that each member of your table can wield a bottle in each fist. The place is always packed at lunchtime, so between 12 and 2pm expect that you may only be able to secure yourself a single bottle with which to defend yourself.

I arrived around 1:30 and was guided to the only spare seat in the house. I shared my table with two Central American guys who loudly compared Uruguayan and Argentinian women in Spanish, and a lone but chatty Chinese man who was amazed at my dexterity with the chopsticks and was somehow responsible for ensuring that a large number of Cambodia’s garment factories never run short of power. For someone that had spent the last ten years in Phnom Penh taunting the fickle Cambodian gods of electricity, he was a remarkably jovial fellow.

The menu has not more than 12 items, eight of which are noodle (fried or soup), a choice of fried or steamed pork and chive dumplings, and the mystery items: “mixed stewed meats” and “pure stewed meats”. All are between one and two dollars, except for the stewed meats which will set you back at least three dollars.

Noodle Goodness

While I was taking shots of the fried pork and chive dumplings ($1, above), my digital camera gave up the ghost. Count this as the first review where the main event, Noodle Soup with Pork ($1), is photographically absent.

The stock in the noodle soup was much less complex than Vietnamese pho, but sweet with plenty of porkfat and MSG umami-punch. The greenery component consists of wilted lettuce, already added to the soup. Lettuce should not be a soup ingredient, and once it is in there, is remarkably difficult to avoid eating. The noodles were spot on: perfectly textured, inconsistently shaped but as fresh as a mountain stream; as were the slices of pork: thick, fatty, and almost too rich for lunch. Iced tea was complimentary.

Location:On Monivong near the corner of St. 278

Seeing how the other half lives – Malis and Pacharan

I’ve had an excellent weekend of eating because I’ve had a friend in town who was up for an Ibero-Khmer food mashup and acting as an excuse to eat out for every meal.

Previously I’ve avoided Mali’s because of the large number of Black Landcruisers out the front. I’m convinced that if the ratio of Black to White Landcruisers is wrong, either the food is bad, expensive and over-Westernised (too many White) or the venue is actually a karaoke brothel (too many Black). Mali’s is in fact, neither. Khmer purists will inevitably point out that the food is both Westernised (i.e. the delicious Pumpkin Brulee; the general presentation; the lack of bones or napkins dropped on the floor) and under the fickle influence of Thailand (‘Ack! Lime leaves!’), but I’m a strong believer that absolute authenticity is for chumps. Eating in air-conditioned comfort during the hot season is a godsend.

You know that you are really settling into Phnom Penh when faux-Angkorean statues have the inability to look anything but cheesy and you have hot season fever dreams wherein you are chased by people with stone Jayavaraman heads or Rama’s deadly monkey army.The cheesiness at Mali’s is toned down a notch but I still can’t help but cringe at neon-lit Leper King statue at the entrance. It isn’t to my personal taste but as Edward Said sez ‘Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’. Bring it on.

Unable to cope with the postcolonial landscaping dissonance, we ascended the cantilever stairs into air-conditioned comfort. Our attentive, besuited waiter was particularly keen to pimp a langoustine tamarind-sour soup upon us, with which we had no truck. We opted for a round of cocktails while we perused the photo-rich menu.

After much discussion of the campness of the Side Car versus the Long Island Ice Tea as metonym for suburban housewife alcoholism, we agreed upon entrées of the small ‘natural scallops’ in rich glutinous sauce ($4.90) and the extra chunky prawn cakes ($4.90). Despite our waiter’s samla fetish, for mains, we shared one gigantic King Crab ‘fresh from Kep’ ($9.20) with my current favorite local ingredient: fresh green Kampot pepper; stuffed pork fillet ($4.80); and a falling-off-the-bone duck curry with a yellow kroueng sauce ($5.10) rounded out our five meat meal. We washed it down with a bottle of the reasonably priced Marsanne ($16).

There’s no denying that this is the most expensive Cambodian food that I’ve eaten in Phnom Penh, if not the most expensive Cambodian food available. I’m well past feeling guilty about eating a meal that adds up to the same amount as a coworkers monthly salary. If you’re keen to show that upscale Khmer food can fit into the Western paradigm of good food, Mali’s is probably the place to coax your foreign visitor, before you head downmarket.

Overall, I award the experience two Leper King arms and one Landcruiser out of a possible two.

Location: Just south of the Independence Monument on Norodom Boulevard. Yellow Pages.

I can’t believe it’s not patxaran

Pacharan is still Phnom Penh’s most talked about venue, if only because of the impact of walking up the stairs into the second-floor restaurant and feeling that ‘I can’t believe I’m in Cambodia’ sensation warm you like a glass of sloe and aniseed liquor. Its immaculate timber fitout, hammered copper features, custom artwork and stained glass in orange and yellow hues lend the stairwell and room a real warmth and depth of character that most Phnom Penh eateries sadly lack. It certainly isn’t like your average Spanish tapas bar but it is the only one with a view of fisherfolk floating down the Tonle Sap.

I’m glad we booked a table because by 8:00pm the room was packed and loud, with patrons being seated at the bar in wait. It is a strange sight to see waitstaff moving efficiently and at speed in Cambodia, but both were happening as the frantic open kitchen churned out Spanish morsels.

Service was not only quick but impeccable. Our thin wafers of manchego cheese, cheese-stuffed eggplant, albondigas, both the chicken and vegetable croquettes (all around $4 each) arrived within 10 minutes of our order; and our second jug of Sangria ($11) was refilled practically without needing to ask.

The big surprise for me was being served some rocket as a garnish. Rocket self-seeded in my tiny garden patch in Australia and grew at a rate that even the most maddened pesto fiend couldn’t pulverise it into a tasty pulp, before it outstripped my entire backyard. It not only had the ability to grow between the cracks in the pavement but could also materialise from the aether fully-formed. If I hadn’t left the country I believe that it would have achieved sentience and triffid-like defences by now. I realised that I had not tasted a single sprig of the peppery green since I left Australia more than a year ago and now it has returned to overrun Cambodge.

Pacharan might be the first tapas bar in Phnom Penh, but it certainly won’t be the last judging by the response from nearby businesses. K-West is holding a Spanish Week this week and Sa, next door to the Pacharan entrance, has already added tapas to the menu. Misguided stupidity is the sincerest form of flattery. I’m hoping that we’ll also be seeing a new era of Ibero-Khmer crossover: num anksom with Iberian ham, kroeung paella, prahok-stuffed olives and palm wine sangria.

Location: Corner Sisowath Quay and St.184. Enter on St.184. Yellow Pages.

Pho and breaks at Saigon Restaurant

Saigon Restaurant

I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that Indochina’s breakbeat scene is going to cut loose soon. There’s enough cheap midi keyboards floating around the music stores and the best software that money can pirate available. As soon as people run out of rhymes for ‘Sabai’ then producers of bad Khmer pop will snap from their karaoke haze and start syncopating some big fat beats. This suspicion has been badly compounded by my dinner of pho and Tiger lager at Saigon Restaurant last night. Shortly after being seated by the staff, I was assaulted with a few tracks from Roni Size’s New Forms and the Fatboy Slim remix of 1998 classic Renegade Master, all played at ear-bleed volume. Extremely fishy.

pho at Saigon Restaurant

As you can see from the above photo, by night Saigon Restaurant is poorly lit by a paltry array of fairy lights, possibly to replicate that feeling of eating pho from an unlit roadside. An unlit roadside with a bass bin. In my pho bo ($1, but I’m paying for atmosphere), I could roughly make out three halved beef balls floating about, a sizable portion of real cow meat slices, and a few spring onions. As you can see near my helmet, it came with most the fixings: basil (chee krohom), saw tooth leaf (chee parang), halved limes, bean shoots. Good star anise and cinnamon kick in the practically unsalted broth. To top things off, tea was complimentary and the waiter generously left an entire colander full of ice on my table: a completely disproportionate response to my order of a single Tiger lager ($1.25).

Along with the pho (bo only, no ga), Saigon has a fistful of Vietnamese standards on its short menu, and will sear you quail, cockles and beef on their barbecue at the entrance.

Location: Above Vina Store, on the corner of Monivong and St.228.

Tony Wheeler needs new Friends

On my Singapore-Shanghai jaunt I spent a couple of nights in Phnom Penh and if the restaurants I tried hadn’t been up to scratch I would have been severely disappointed, since I was dining with Nick Ray. He’s the author of our Cambodia guide and also advised on locations for the movie Tomb Raiders’ Cambodian sites, Nick knows his way around the country. Friends was set up to employ street kids, many of whom go on to work in other hotels and restaurants. The food is superb.

When asked to name his top ten restaurants worldwide, Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler lists Friends of Phnom Penh, which left me with one question: what the fuck? I admire Friends’ work and know a couple of successful graduates from their hospitality training but their pseudo-tapas eatery hardly rates alongside the world’s or even Cambodia’s best restaurants. Although the Lonely Planet is almost my last resort for a restaurant recommendation (fitting somewhere between “moto-taxi driver” and “the khmer guy who eats the leftovers from my bin”), I’m going to take my future food advice from them with a mound of salt.