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The first question you’d ask is “what’s Cambodian food?” I suppose it was the soups and rice and fish my Khmer co-workers ordered whenever we went for lunch. It was a family affair, the odd Khmer soup terrine with a hole in the middle (like a Bundt cake pan), from which you ladle the blandish soups into your rice bowl, and the whole fried or gilled fish which everyone picks from. But is that it for Khmer food? By no means.

For me, it was “authentic” enough to make a semi-regular trip to Pon Lok on the riverfront. It was usually but not always packed with Phnom Penh’s “elite” and VIP middle class (judging from the Benz’s in front), and the normal scattering of NGOs. I recall an extensive menu of chicken, pork, seafood and other dishes and we always had good meals there. Fried frog legs (which were massive) and a memorable diced chicken with some kinds of nuts stick in mind. By my standards, any restaurant with 80 percent Khmer customers was “authentic” Khmer.

On the opposite end of the scale were our adventures to the evening “dinner market” which used to form immediately west of the (then) “new” Psah O’Reiussy construction site. It was strictly a Ma and Pa operation with 20 or 30 vendors presenting their homemade delectables in huge pots, portable grills, boxes, whatever. Everything was pre-made, and included various kinds of fish, stews, curries, vegetable dishes, and the like, as well as enormous rice pots suited to feed an army. It was just a matter of pointing at what looked tasty and probably wouldn’t kill you. Whatever you wanted was packed directly into a plastic bag or styrofoam container, and of course this approach was cheap beyond description, a huge and delicious take-home meal for 5,000 reil or so.

Of course we were taking our lives in hand by eating there, and our hotel management warned us repeatedly that eventually we’d get deathly sick from the food (I wasn’t too concerned since my last illness had been a bout of food poisoning more than a year before in Kathmandu, and I felt my resistance was now quite high to any Asian street food, which proved to be true).

It’s been a long time now and I apologize for not remembering the Khmer names, but many of the “authentic” Khmer foods also have a Vietnamese analog. For example directly across from what’s now the “new” Psah O’Reiussy and on the same street as the awful Capitol Guest House was an outstanding “pho” restaurant (again, don’t recall Khmer name for this). It was always packed for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and had excellent pho bo (beef) and even better pho bo long (the “long” in Vietnamese meaning a smattering of the offal and innards like heart, liver, intestines, whatever). The same place also had a big evening snack crowd which would gather on the sidewalk toddler-tables and chairs for “pong tea khon” which are the boiled duck eggs with embryo included (”balut” in the Phillipines and “hot vit lon” in VN). Not my favorite but popular with the Khmer.

And there were a couple enterprising drinks vendors who set up shop on the sidewalk next door, one selling “chuk a luk” which was a variety of fruits (your choice, point at them), condensed canned milk, and crushed ice thrown in a blender to make a delicious evening treat (the name “chuk a luk” comes from the sound of the blender mashing the fruits and ice together). The other vendor had freshly-pressed sugar cane juice, which he’d make on demand by running several canes through the press, and capturing the delicious juice directly in your ice-packed cup.

Is all of that “authentic”? It must have been, because we’d rarely see any other Westerners at these places but plenty of hungry and thirsty Khmer.

Just up the street toward Monivong was an elderly street vendor who sold a delicious evening meal which I never saw anywhere else, and he had quite a bustling business. His cart was half storage, half frying grill. Accompanied by a daughter or two (his support crew), he’d fry up a serving of cooked noodles, bean sprouts and a couple other vegetables, topped with one or two fried eggs and an unusual vinegary-sweet sauce that brought everything together. If I recall this quick and lovely “authentic Khmer” meal was about 1500 reil at the time.

Phnom Penh also had a number of “hot pot” (Vietnamese “lau”) restaurants which I recall always being packed with locals. There were several on Monivong which I recall liking, but they also had a reputation (deserved or not) for random and deadly gunplay, especially when Cambodian army guys were there. So we tended to avoid them despite the good food. In any case that may be a thing of the past… All “hot pot” places are pretty much the same. There’s a clay pot with steaming broth and a burner placed center of the table, followed by an array of vegetables, dried noodles, meats and sauces. There’s a matter of careful sequencing (the foods cook differently), but the basic idea is to toss stuff into the pot and remove it when it’s cooked. Everyone shares the pot and the foods, which are plopped into the ubiquitous rice bowl (but now used for the noodles) and dipped into the lucious sauces. $10 US for 4 people excluding Tiger beer and some high-octane liquors that came in small soda pop bottles.

As an aside, “hot pot” has a bit of a “guy thing” attached to it, especially the goat meat version which is said to make you randy. But I think the real reason is that it’s also a tad messy and also that proximity to the hot pot makes everyone sweat like pigs, especially on an 85F degree Phnom Penh evening (I have yet to visit a hot pot restaurant with aircon, they’re always open window and/or streetside affairs).

If you’re not up for sweating, you can also grab 500 grams or so of roast pork from street vendors or the food sections of the larger markets, which by the way normally have several Ma and Pa restaurants inside. One place I recall had a big crowd for it’s delicious “bun xeo” (that’s the VN name), which is a rice pancake packed with pork, shrimp, sprouts, and some herbs. Is that “authentic Khmer”? I suppose it is, since I was the only non-Khmer at the breakfast counter.

I’ve rambled on long enough, but I wanted to save the best for last.

There’s one Khmer food which I’d call truly authentic, available on almost every streetcorner, and so much in demand that you’d better stock up before 9:00 or 10:00 AM.

Are we talking prahok (fish sauce)?
Nope.
Grilled crickets and little snakes from the Bassac river?
Uh unh.
Dried squid?

Nope. It’s baguettes. French bread baguettes. Baguettes that you can smell from a block away. A warm, yeasty, pleasant odor that overcomes the normal smelly clouds of rot and decay that can attack you anywhere in Phnom Penh.

Once you’ve smelled that lucious odor, it’s only a matter of seeking out the Khmer lady with her huge bamboo basket covered by a cloth and loaded with 50 or 100 of those delicious loaves. When I was in Phnom Penh they were 3 medium loaves for 3500 reil (then $1 US). If they were still warm you were in for a heavenly experience. I could eat one and sometimes two directly from the basket with no butter or jam or anything at all. Adding some butter seems gross in SE Asia (if you can find it), but a wedge or three of Laughing Cow cheese (available everywhere) goes well. For the “authentic Khmer” experience, grab a can of sardines in tomato sauce (all of the markets carry them) and shovel the entire can into your split baguette. Yum. Truly Khmer, truly delish.

One of the big unknown secrets about the former colonies of Indochina - particularly Cambodia and Vietnam - is that both developed local expertise in French-inspired cooking over their 60 years of colonization. That survives today in my two favorite “Khmer” and “Vietnamese” foods: baguettes and omlettes. They are so good that I became addicted to my Indochinese breakfast of a nice fresh baguette, a bacon omlette, and a glass of thick, black “cafe Khmer” or “cafe dien”. French acquaintances (Parisian French no less!) consistently told me that Cambodian and French baguettes were often superior to what they bought in Paris. And as an American omlette expert, I can attest that the eggs were better in Vietnam and Cambodia as well (maybe it was a secret sprinkle of nuoc mam?).

In any case to make it the true Khmer indigenous experience, make sure that you get a small side dish of teuk trei (fish sauce, “nuoc mam” in VN) with a few chopped-up Thai bird chilis mixed in. Split your baguette, stuff it with omlette, and dip judiciously in this now very spicy fish sauce. If you’ve developed a “taste” for fish sauce and chilis as I have, you’ll soon be ordering a second small dish and ladleing it by the spoonful directly on top of your omlette. Heaven.

You’re not likely to see your average Khmer or Vietnamese going for this breakfast, but it does bring together two of the local foods that both countries pull-off flawlessly, and in my opinion better than you’ll find in the west.

If that’s not “authentic”, I don’t know what is.

I wonder how many Skuon stories have been written in the last 5 years? It all started with Vibe: The Cambodian Scene #1, if I recall. (Prior to its resurrection as ‘The Cambodian Scene’).