Family sits for khtieu (Khmer noodle soup) breakfast at dawn, Psar Loeu, Siem Reap
Over half a million foreigners arrive in Siem Reap every year but go to the biggest market in town, Psar Loeu, and you’d be convinced otherwise. When you arrive at daybreak for breakfast, any self-respecting tourist is sitting in front of […]
The Nehru jacket. The jacket so nice that they named a Pacific island after it. The crisp battle armour of Third World service staff. Beige. The person inside it greets you in a characterless patter that suggests you’ve arrived in a non-place, a refuge from whichever city the hotel is located. It is a garment […]
The roadside from Siem Reap to the outlying temple of Banteay Srei is dotted with huge woks filled with a foaming, sweet mystery. Most tourists steam past in their tour buses and tuk tuks, desperate to hit Banteay Srei before the morning light dissipates and thus don’t get the chance to discover what those woks […]
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. […]
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 […]
Unlike most people, I have a high tolerance for eating things that I cannot identify taxonomically. Whenever I pass somebody on a roadside shucking something that looks edible, I’ll give it a go. Often it’s not edible. Often it’s not even supposed to be food.
This roadside vendor was undergoing the arduous process of cracking […]
A central problem when Cambodia watchers discuss the future of Cambodia is the sense of inevitable, oncoming doom. The local polity may not have fallen entirely off the rails yet, but the train is currently making some irregular metallic grinding sounds. This often leads to a tendency to invoke a nostalgia for the Cambodian past, […]
There are very few things about Cambodian food that are set in stone, except for the love of charred animal flesh, which is literally set in stone in the above bas relief from the late 12th Century. It is located on the eastern outer side of Bayon in Angkor Thom, Siem Reap.
One of the more annoying features of travel journalism about Cambodia is that it fails wholeheartedly to put Angkor in a modern historical perspective. Most travel writers tend to treat the site with breathless hyperbole, fixing the ruins within a mysterious, mythic past without attempting to locate them within modern Cambodian culture. For the most […]
Sachiko Kojima opened a cookie factory. She was soon supplying foreign tourists from Japan and around the globe with souvenir confections from this northern Cambodia city, the gateway to the Angkor Wat Khmer ruins. Her “Madam Sachiko” cookies, shaped like the ancient ruins, are now the must-buy souvenir for tourists visiting the city.
As much as […]
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