Siem Reap, Cambodia – Please do not let a cuisine of crickets, cockroaches, boas, spiders and fruit bats deter you from spending a second honeymoon in Cambodia.
I’m concluding two weeks in this fascinating country, and among the land mines, poverty and government corruption, Cambodia can be a land of true dining romance. And no, spiders under candlelight are no better than spiders in a filthy public market.
What I’m talking about is an isolated table, adorned by a single candle on an undeveloped beach and facing the crashing surf of the Gulf of Thailand. Or having your own thatch-covered gazebo, one light fixture hanging overhead, the wind whipping through your beach stuff just 30 feet from the surf as you eat garlic crab for $5, the most expensive meal you’ll have in the country.
Or fine dining in the capital of Phnom Penh where at Khmer Surin I sat shoeless on the floor against angled pillows. I looked out at the bustle of the street below as sweet Cambodian flute music filled my upstairs patio dining nook.
Don’t worry. Cockroaches are not on the menu here. In Cambodia I discovered many wonderful taste thrills, from deliciously cold fresh fruit shakes, freshwater seafood and shellfish, all served after wiping off the day’s sweat with a washcloth dipped in fragrant cold water.
But my biggest surprise was a terrific dish called coconut amok. It’s like coconut curry but thicker, like a sauce, and much sweeter. I had chicken coconut amok at Le Roseau, on the aforementioned isolated table in the beach town of Sihanoukville. It was so thick, I could eat the sauce with my chopsticks and sweet enough to resemble the coconut candle I’ve carried in my backpack since Vietnam.
While you can get Vietnamese or Thai food on merely a short drive to Federal Boulevard, Cambodian cuisine is pretty unusual. Picture Thai food without the pop. It also has influences from India, where Cambodia’s original Khmer people came from in the 1st century A.D. You also taste lemongrass from Vietnam, which controlled Cambodia from 1979-89.
France also controlled Cambodia for nearly 70 years but the only thing French I can find in Cambodian cuisine are baguettes and really lousy beer.
More than any food, Cambodians are heavily into soups. For me, this is problematic. April is the hottest month of the year here and every day in June has been about 90 degrees with at least 80 percent humidity. African violets couldn’t handle this heat.
The sight of Cambodian families huddled together in markets, shoveling in their steaming rice porridge called bobor made me long for a Waffle House on the Kansas Turnpike.
But I broke down here in Siem Reap, the gateway to the ancient kingdom of Angkor. One morning at 7 I went to a local hangout called The Soup Dragon and had Cambodian beef stew. I ate the whole bowl and did not melt into a pool of protoplasm under the table.
It featured fat juicy chunks of lean beef wrapped in thin rice noodles in a dark, thick broth spiced with carrots and mint. Still, I wondered how a population that’s 90 percent farmers could stomach soup every day in a climate that can wilt bamboo.
I asked my 21-year-old waitress at Le Roseau, Paula Y (yes, it is a one-letter last name), and she said, “People here work very hard. They need soup to get more power. You feel better later than if it’s fried.”
You mean, like the many fat Americans who have been returning to Cambodia in droves lately? She laughed then coyly replied, “Westerners use more butter and oil. They’re obese. You must make a lot of sport to stay thin.”
One way to get thin, Americans, is to visit Sihanoukville’s public market. I love public markets. You get the freshest produce, the most natural pictures. But Sihanoukville’s is the Calcutta Black Hole of public markets. Imagine buying food in a covered sweatshop where an open trench runs right down the middle. It’s oozing with a thick liquid matter of unknown origins. Then imagine sweating Cambodian women ladling into plastic bags murky soup filled with what can only be described as large eggs with a single eyeball.
This is where I was told dog curry could be found here but that no dog would be caught dead eating here.
I preferred the public market here in Siem Reap where one night I perused a glass display case featuring pig intestines. I also saw cow tongue, which looked hauntingly familiar to my late Uncle Gene’s. The next day, my guide for Angkor suggested I try cow penis. (I am not making this up.)
So there is something for every taste in Cambodia: for the romantic, the health nut, the adventurer and the desperate. And, oh yes. There’s also something for the nostalgic, that herbalist who wants to relive the old Cambodia they knew from those wild ’60s.
Or did I mention Phnom Penh’s “happy” pizza?
John Henderson can be reached at jhenderson@denverpost.com or 303-820-1299.
