Phnom Penh – Page 4 – Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

USA Donuts

It was only a matter of time before a Cambodian returned from the USA with a head full of dreams and belly full of deep-fried rings o’ lard. With the opening of USA Donuts, the Californian-Cambodian cruller csardom has spread its greasy wings back to the homeland.

The insides of the store are literally identical to your average American Mom-and-Pop donut shop: wide selection of donuts behind plexiglass counter, cheap furniture, terrible coffee waiting tepidly in vacuum flasks on the counter. Unlike your average USA lard ring vendor, you can buy a taro-flavoured thickshake as well as a variety of other American junk foods. They serve fried chicken, but no sign yet of the elusive chicken and waffles.

After a small amount of confusion as to which of the seven women behind the counter worked there, I ordered one of the plain yeast rings, a chocolate-iced cake donut and a cup of their coffee from the vacuum flask dispenser (2500 riel). Of the three blends of coffee, I went for “Cambodian” flavour and to my surprise, it didn’t taste like either kroueng or prahok. Neither donut was too lardy and if you happened to catch the yeast ring coming fresh from the oven, it would be a fairly close match to Krispy Kreme’s Original Glazed.

For those of you rendered incapable of leaving your abode, USA Donuts will deliver by the dozen in the Phnom Penh area.

Location:No.15, St 136, Phnom Penh

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.

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.

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.

This little piggy went to market.

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.

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.

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

Vegetarian noodles at Psar Orussei

Psar Orussei is the market where you can find all of the crap that you can’t find at any other market in Cambodia. My first impression of the place was that it was extremely handy if you lived in Phnom Penh, but nigh on useless if you were just passing through. Partly, this was because I had never arrived there at seven in the morning for both breakfast and to find cardboard boxes with a vegetarian.

I hold the strong belief that vegetarians are nuts. If the Gods had wanted us to eat only vegetables, they would have sent forth a bacon tree and possibly a steak bush to keep the halal and kosher folk prostrate in veneration for Them as well. Thankfully for vegetarians, a very small handful of Cambodians are pro-herbivore and much less on the militant carnivore jihad than I am. Let it be known that I tolerate vegetarians, if only to convert them to my true faith.

At 7am, the central food vendor section of Psar Orussei is buzzing with locals looking for their morning noodle or pork and rice injection. The vegetarian specialists were easy to find: they all have “VEGETA RIAN” or variants thereof plastered across the front of their stalls. After much conferring, Stall 177 was deemed the pick of the anti-meat vendors. I opted for the rice noodle soup (khtieav).

If I happened to be shipwrecked on a vegetarian island, after I had eaten my comrades and my stock of human jerky began to dwindle, wheat gluten would become my favourite meat analogue. In my soup, you will notice two distinct forms of gluten, fecklessly pretending to be meat. A few rubbery mushroom balls, lettuce, spring onions, and a single slice of carrot provide some more flotsam in the thin vegetable stock. Proportionally, there was an excellent ratio of rice noodle to flotsam. My vegetarian friend heartily approves.

One third condensed milk, two-thirds coffee: from zero to toothless crone in a single glass.

Vegetarian khtieav and a cup of coffee (2500 riel, US$0.62)

Location: Stall 177, ground floor, Psar O’Russei, Phnom Penh

Chinese Noodles Restaurant

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.

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

Donuts at Bokor Cinema

Come rain or shine, this husband and wife donut duo never move from just outside the Bokor Cinema on Mao Tse Toung Boulevard. They’ve always got a customer or four hanging around which generally bodes well. I’m almost embarrassed when I drop in because I see them every day on my way to work and am yet to purchase a single deep-fried product from them. Through sheer weight of luck, I happened upon them when they were cutting up a fresh batch. The process is as follows:

Firstly, remove your dough from the plastic bag underneath the roof of your cart, where it has been proving in the scorching heat.

Secondly, clean the surface of your cart (as unbelievable as this may sound) and give it a liberal dusting with riceflour. Flatten your wheat/rice flour dough out with a rolling pin.

Thirdly, cut into strips, paying attention not to accidentally remove your enormous, decorative thumbnail in the process. Roll into flat disks and dust with a few sesame seeds. Hand over to your wife, the deep frying expert.

Serve to the Westerner who is paying far too much attention and asking too many questions for your liking. Charge him 500 riel (12.5 cents) for four.

I’m glad that I didn’t drop in earlier as I’d probably be about ten kilos heavier by now. These yeasty pillows are packed with chewy deliciousness: hollow to the core, only slightly sweet, and blisteringly hot out of the fryer. Sadly, I didn’t get the Khmer name for them, although I had a longer than usual, Beckettian interrogation of the vendors that ran along these lines:

Phil: What are these?
Vendor: (Nervous laugh) You understand Khmer.
Phil: Yes. A little. What are these?
Vendor: Food
Phil: Bread?
Vendor: Yes. Bread.
Phil: Fried bread?
Vendor: Yes. Fried bread.
Phil: Are they chaway*? or fried bread?
Vendor: I don’t have any chaway.
Phil: Yes, I understand. What are these?
Vendor: Food.
Phil: (Clutches head in hands)

Location: Just west of Bokor Cinema, near the corner of St. 95 and Mao Tse Toung Boulevard, Phnom Penh

* – Chaway are the donuts that you often have with soup, similar to the Chinese donuts that you eat with congee.

Addendum (21 June 2006): As a very weird aside, according to AsianWeek in 2000, 90 percent of California’s independent doughnut stores are owned by Cambodian expats.

Mobile Ice Cream: Droppin’ Science

Just as I was finishing my year-long opus on the microbiological make-up of Phnom Penh’s streetside icecream, I discovered that the French beat me to it by almost ten years. Damn you, Institut Pasteur du Cambodge. To wit:

A study of the microbiological quality of ice creams/sorbets sold on the streets of Phnom Penh city was conducted from April 1996 to April 1997. Socio-demographic and environmental characteristics with two ice/ice creams samples were collected from vendors selected in the city. A total of 105 vendors and 210 ice/ice creams samples were randomly selected for the study period. Ice/ice cream vendors in the streets of Phnom Penh were adults (mean age: 28 years old) with a male predominance (86.5%). Mean educational level of vendors was 5 years with no training in mass catering. Most ice creams and sorbets (81.7%) were made using traditional methods.

Microbiological analysis performed in the laboratory of Pasteur Institute of Cambodia indicated the poor bacteriological quality of the samples. The proportions of samples classified unsafe according to microbiological criteria were 83.3% for total bacterial count at 30 degrees C, 70% for total coliforms, 30% for faecal coliforms, 12.2% for Staphylococcus aureus and 1.9% for presence of Salmonella spp. These bacterial results suggest that many other food products sold in the streets may be similarly poor. Safety measures should be undertaken to avoid potential threats. Regulation of the street food sector should be part of a larger strategy for enhanced food safety and environmental quality in the city.

Things have either improved in the last ten years or I just happen to pick the 16.7% of icecream vendors who are free from bacteria, assuming that there is a high degree of cross-contamination and my secret superpower is not the ability to digest anything.

The full report has some great demographic info to spice up your icecream vendor-related dinner party conversation:

Average number of years in the profession was 2 years.
Average number of working days was 6 per week and each vendor worked 47 weeks during the year.
65.4% of vendors made their own icecream, 16.3% bought from other small vendors, and 18.3% bought theirs from a larger icecream business.
The average number of portions sold per day was 177.
The average daily profit was US$2.30

My only question is: how do I get funding to study street food for a whole year?

See: Kruy Sl, Soares Jl, Ping S et al. Microbiological quality of ” ice, ice cream sorbet” sold on the streets of Phnom Penh; April 1996-April 1997. Bull Soc Pathol Exot 2001; 94 (5): 411-414. Original PDF in French. Includes photos of the four distinct modes of icecream vendor .

Previously on Phnomenon: Icecream Sandwich on Wheels

Tip Off: Talkin’ to a Stranger has proper beer

As you may have guessed from my Cambodian beer reviews, I sorely miss a bottle-conditioned beer. As if St. Arnold had answered my hop-infused prayers, Talkin’ to a Stranger now has it in the form of South Australian beers, Coopers Sparkling Ale and Coopers Pale Ale. At $3 a bottle, I’ll drop by whenever my palate needs resetting.

Location: Talkin’ to A Stranger, #21, Street 294, not far from the corner of Sothearos.

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 entrÃ©es 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

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.