Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

Reader quiz: what the hell is the above vendor doing? And does he get to lick his arms afterwards?

In short, no.

In New York, transplanted Hong Kong hands have a couple of Chinatowns to choose from. Colombians can head out to Queens for an oblea caramel wafer and yucca bread under the elevated train tracks. Eastern Europeans longing for a borscht can ride the F train to Brighton Beach. West Africans have the Bronx, […]

Thanks for emailing about the plane crash near Kampot, but thankfully, I was not involved in it. I’m too cheap to fly between Sihanoukville and Siem Reap.
I made it to Kampot safely and my only risk now is a fatal crab-and-pepper overdose.

Cambodians are world champion charcutiers. What the locals lack in quality produce, they make up for in sheer volume and world-beating determination. A Cambodian household that doesn’t dry its own fish, meat scraps or leftover rice is rarer than one that doesn’t enjoy the sublime beauty of prahok. Everybody knows how to sun-dry their own […]

I’m on the road with Austin from RealThai, visiting all the food hotspots in Cambodia that begin with the letter “S”: Siem Reap, Snoul, Skuon and Sre Ambel. As such, things are going to be a little slow at Phnomenon for a few days. I suggest catching up on some great food bloggers from the […]

Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling.
So says Mercutio, regarding the “Egg Man” debate currently raging in The Cambodia Daily letters page. For those of you playing at home, Phnom Penh’s aural landscape […]

One of the horrors of leaving your home for a foreign country is leaving a life’s worth of accumulation behind. One of the joys of arriving is accumulating anew and realising that a huge amount of what you’ve previously accumulated is ephemera. Left is a photo of the entirety of my current cookware in Cambodia. […]

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 […]

The above photo is the fish amok from Malis restaurant in Phnom Penh – the same amok that I shot for the Wall Street Journal article. I expected that they’d use this photo rather than the one that they did – this is about as well as I can capture gratuitous, selectively-focused food porn without […]

If there is one thing that Cambodia loves more than its food, its a proverb. Maytel, over at Gut Feelings (where I also occasionally contribute non-Cambodian food jackassery) has unearthed a swathe of food-related proverbs. My favorite:

“The pig dies because it is meat”
See: Gut Feelings