Khmer Kitchen, Siem Reap, Cambodia

We did so love the food in Cambodia...

In Siem Reap, there is a little alleyway near the market lined with inexpensive restaurants that cater to foreigners. We selected one, the Khmer Kitchen, on our first evening in town. The food was so delicious that we returned again the next night, and the next. We were never disappointed.

Our favorites included the vegetable dumplings, the amok, and the "Khmer curry" (similar to a southern Thai yellow curry). We also enjoyed a couple of the potato dishes. The Angkor beer was pleasantly cheap, and the mango smoothies were refreshing.

At the end of a hot day of sightseeing, Khmer Kitchen was the perfect place to relax and enjoy the evening.

An Afternoon and Evening in Kampong Cham

With only six days to spend in Cambodia, we planned to focus on its major destinations: the capital city of Phnom Penh, and the Angkor Wat area around Siem Riap. When our friend Vanessa, a former Peace Corps Thailand volunteer and current Cambodia resident, told us she’d be in the small town of Kampong Cham during our visit, however, we decided it was worth making a short detour to a less-visited spot. It was well worth the effort.

We arrived in KC hungry after spending hours on the bus, so we rushed out to one of Vanessa’s recommended restaurants on the river road. There are two places along the river, both owned by foreigners, that serve a combination of Western and Cambodian food. We went to the one closer to our hotel.

I think we shocked the owner a bit with our appetites, and then we were shocked ourselves by the amount of food that arrived at our table. We feasted on vegetarian spring rolls, amoc, and stir-fried vegetables with tofu.
I also enjoyed a mango shake. Yum!

Dining on the Mekong River was pleasant as usual, and some excitement occurred when a political parade suddenly came along. Dozens of trucks and hundreds of motorcycles, all filled with cheering, singing, laughing Cambodians in light blue shirts, streamed by. We were impressed by both the enthusiasm of the political expression and the relative calmness of the parade as a whole, as in Thailand such events are usually marked by excessive drunkenness. We waved and clapped for the riders.

Vanessa was working a temporary contract with Peace Corps Cambodia, which just started in January (hooray!), as a trainer for the newly arrived volunteers. We met her and one of her fellow trainers, a long-time Peace Corps international staff person from Nepal, at the riverside park across the street from our hotel. Over Angkor beer, they told us some of the stories of the new Cambodia volunteers.

Despite the size of our earlier meal, we were hungry enough to wander down to the second of Vanessa’s two favorite restaurants with her after dark. Robert tried one of the traditional Cambodian beef dishes, which he reported was delicious, while I had a simple vegetable curry. Vanessa told us more about Cambodia and its problems, which we appreciated learning because as tourists it’s often difficult to see behind the outer facade of daily life.

Among some of the issues we discussed were the relative dangerousness of life, in particular at night; the astounding corruption that occurs at all levels of government and business; the marked gap between the extremely wealthy and the rest of the population; and the continuing effects of the Khmer Rouge regime and genocide.

Of all her stories, the ones about corruption were most disturbing to me. Because she had been working closely with the new volunteers and their Cambodian counterparts, she had many stories about how corruption was manifested at the school level. Teachers make just $45 per month in Cambodia, which is an astonishingly small amount, even in this poor country. As a result, teachers spend a majority of their time trying to make money from activities other than teaching, such as attending paid workshops, doing paid tutoring, or working at other jobs. Students are charged for the paper on which they take tests, because the teachers have to buy it out of their own pocket. School is closed far more often than it’s open – in the two months that the trainees had been in Kampong Cham, school had only been open for four days. And summer break was still weeks away.

I thought the school system was bad in Thailand, and it is, but Cambodia made Thai education look like a stellar example. I was constantly frustrated when classes were cancelled on a weekly basis in Thailand, but I can’t imagine the frustration I’d face if they were cancelled every day! It’s hard to know what hope there is for a country in that situation. You’ve got to have a critical mass of people who are interested enough in making things different for it to actually happen. Because of the way that corruption works in Cambodia, enabling people who take advantage of the system to be better off than those that want to make it work, it looks like there won’t be much improvement any time soon. We’d never have known all this about Cambodia just from being tourists. It is really worth it to spend time talking with someone who knows what going on, down on the level of the real people!

Food in Phnom Penh

As I have mentioned on my Peace Corps Thailand blog, I’m a vegetarian. However, I’ll occasionally eat fish when traveling if it seems like the best way to enjoy a particular local cuisine. This was certainly the case in Cambodia!

Our first dinner in Phnomn Penh was eaten at the Khmer Boran Restaurant on the river, which had been recommended in the Lonely Planet. The recommendation was well deserved – that was some of our favorite food from the entire trip! We started with a light pomelo salad, which was very flavorful in a delicate way.

That was followed by two fish dishes – amok and fish with palm sugar. Amok is a Cambodian specialty featuring fish cooked in coconut milk with assorted flavors (lemongrass, basil, etc). It came served in a banana leaf wrapper and was fantastic. We vowed to eat as much of it as possible during our stay in Cambodia. The fish with palm sugar was almost as good, with a not-quite-sweet flavor.

We were each given a free serving of dragonfruit at the end of the meal, and the entire dinner was nicely accompanied by a shared bottle of Angkor Beer.

Our second day in Phnom Penh, between tourist activities, we decided to splurge on some amok for lunch. There are plenty of small restaurants in the neighborhoods along the Tonle Sap river, so we chose one near our guest house. We shared a plate of amok along with a plate of stir-fried vegetables, and both were quite good. This time the amok came on a plate in a curry form instead of in a banana leaf wrapper.

That evening, having slightly overspent our budget for the day, our dining goals included affordability and Tonle Sap River experience. North of the Grand Palace, there are a number of bars and restaurants lining the riverside park advertising amazingly cheap happy hour specials. We chose one that had 2-for-the-price-of-1 Angkor Beer on tap, with a good view of the activity along the river, and settled in to watch the sunset.

On the walk back to our guest house, we stopped at a noodle shop that appeared to be doing a good business with the locals. We tentatively approached the cook, an older woman positioned above a giant wok with piles of vegetables nearby, and Robert gave our orders in Cambodian. The food arrived just as ordered! We found two spots at a table, the locals showed us which sauces to add, and we were set. It was so good, and so cheap, that Robert went back for a second plate. Three big plates of noodles for just $1.25.