Aphrodisiac salad, 450 million years in the making

Seldom does the great Cambodian-Barang divide appear deeper or more difficult to navigate than at the dining table.

Cambodians eat a lot of weird shit and, if you hang around long enough, eventually someone will insist you eat some weird shit, too.

But native English speakers don’t typically eat alligator. Or monkey. Or crickets or pig brain, either. To most foreign tastes, traditional Khmer cuisine is a minefield of naturally occurring plants and animals wholly lacking in first-world culinary advances like Marmite, Cheez Whiz and other nutritionally devoid, hyper-processed, food-like products. This culinary chasm often makes for strained conversation as perplexed foreigners struggle to understand the appeal of prahok, why someone would want to eat a half-cooked duck foetus, or how a 2,000-year-old fishing culture never learned to fillet.

Misunderstandings go both ways, of course. Locals are unlikely to realise that foreigners prefer their fish without a face and their meat without the bones chopped into tiny pieces. They are unlikely to fully understand the reflexive smiles provoked when they explain to customers, as they do at Andart Rorm, that the name means ‘Dancing Tongue’.

The original Andart Rorm on Street 242 is something of a local seafood institution and the restaurant is well-known for its authentic Cambodian tastes. Its newest shop on Streets 51 and 294 is the restaurant’s attempt to carve into the Western restaurant market.

For newcomers or out-of-towners making their initial forays into Khmer cuisine, Andart Rorm makes a good entry point. Seafood is similar throughout the world, so there are plenty of recognisable dishes to choose from (and some strange ones, too). Portions are large compared to the price and come served in oversized, easy-to-share plates designed to feed three to four people.

The Fried Shrimp With Green Pepper ($8.50) is a standout. Prepared with whole peppercorn stalks and a creamy pepper sauce, the distinctive bite of Kampot green complements the vaguely salty taste of shrimp. The Chinese Spinach And Shrimp ($5), with crunchy, healthy pan-fried stalks, is nearly as good.

For the adventurous, Andart Rorm’s house specialty is the Asian delicacy horseshoe crab, revered for it powers as an aphrodisiac. Known as kapas in the local language, horseshoe crab are not crabs at all but marine arthropods more closely related to spiders or scorpions than crustaceans. They are sometimes called (rather misleadingly) ‘living fossils’ because fossil records exist of such animals, but scientists reject the idea that horseshoe crab stopped evolving 450 million years ago. Today’s species, while similar in appearance, are believed to be far different genetically.

Horseshoe crab are wild, alien-looking creatures with 10 eyes and a large, hard carapace. They contain virtually no edible meat, and nearly all recipes use the eggs of a pregnant female as the core ingredient for salads and other mixed dishes. At Andart Rorm, the signature dish is Special Kapas Egg with Mango Salad ($12).

The small, greenish eggs are mixed with shredded mango and a light assortment of greens, including kafir lime leaves, then drizzled with lime juice and served in the gutted shell of the crab. The eggs are firm and chewy, like dried shrimp. They are rather tasteless, however, and the flavours come from the mango, greens and lime juice. Not unpleasant, the salad wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the shrimp (or as weird).

As for its aphrodisiac powers, the female restaurant staff seemed as horrified to have that conversation as I was to explain the innuendoes involved in dancing tongues. So we stayed silent, leaving the great cultural divide firmly intact.

Andart Rorm, #207 Street 51 & 294.