Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

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 […]

Siem Reap, the increasingly popular base for visitors to Angkor Wat, is beginning to feel a little like the Las Vegas of Cambodia, with one showy hotel after another being built along the highway into town. (Is it just a matter of time before the signature of Steve Wynn graces the skyline?)
Stuart Emmerich from […]

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 […]

Gong xi fa cai.
Last Chinese New Year, I made a few limited and achievable resolutions for Phnomenon..
This Year of the Pig I only have one: achieve global respectability for Cambodian food.
So as well as writing on the web, this year I’m crossing over into the mainstream press. Expect Cambodian food to […]

Il fait saliver ses lecteurs en vantant le mérites des cantines le plus discrètes pour déguster de travers de porc frits ou du num pan chen, la “foccacia” khmère. Il brocarde avec humour journalistes et guides etrangers pour qui la gastronomie cambodgienne se résume au poisson amok ou à exotisme convenu, tels les insects grillés. […]

So sayeth the New York Times in their most recent run-of-the-mill review of Phnom Penh by Stuart Emmerich, who managed to cover the town with his parachute still attached. On matters of eating, he lands a few blows to the doughy belly of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club (”undistinguished (at best), and the toothache-inducing fruity drinks […]

I am always reluctant about taking photographs of children even though they play an integral part in the production, sale and capture of Cambodian food. In part, it’s a consent issue. Partly, it is because I don’t find children interesting and don’t want to despoil my camera of valuable bytes with them. Thankfully, there are […]

Continuing with the Phnomenon/RealThai love-in, Austin over at RealThai reviews one of my favourite Khmer restaurants in Phnom Penh: Sweet Café on St.294. For potential stalkers, it opens with a photo of me looking mighty pleased at my bowl of samlor machou yuon and follows with some beautifully shot images of amok trei (fish amok), […]

“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 […]