Author:

Little Japan

It felt as though I was walking the back streets of Osaka, when really I was smack dab in the centre of Street 63. Dim lighting. Traditional Japanese exteriors. From the street, their names were almost obscured; what they served, a complete mystery. One curious day, we pushed open one of those heavy doors. We asked for the menu, had a seat, a first taste and never looked back. Then we went to the other Japanese restaurant next door, and to the one next door to that, and now I can’t wait to go back for more.

Sumibi Yokochou Japanese BBQ
#81 Street 63; 098 699291
It was almost surreal, stumbling upon this modest dive whose name we only discovered through their business card – and is still a challenge to remember – but the entire experience was more like a meal in Osaka than any other we have had in Phnom Penh. Osaka’s specialty is tabletop charcoal barbecued meat, and at Sumibi Yokochou we were transported even at first glance.

It’s a little joint, with space for just six tables, a pot of coals on each, exhaust tubes hanging from the ceiling to diminish the intense aroma of smoke. Vintage Japanese posters adorn the walls, lifting the restaurant’s status from a bare-bones kind of joint to quite shabbily stylish.

You barely notice this once the food arrives. Choose from a vast array of beef – cheek, rib fingers, loin – and pork, pair it with some Korean Kimchi, and it’s an entirely satisfying meal. Servings are small and the marbling isn’t of the highest quality, but they are marinated well in Japanese seasonings and are scrumptious after they’ve been kissed by the coals. Order the rib fingers, chill to Japanese beats, and it’s easily the cheapest ticket to a night (or a nightcap) in Osaka.

Yakitori Jidaiya
#79a Street 63; 097 2306301
The façade almost fades into the background scenes on Street 63, with its plain exteriors and earthy tones. What a delightful surprise it is then to enter Yakitori Jidaiya and discover a modern and spacious dining area, in a distinctive Japanese design.

Yakitori Jidaiya is one of this restaurant’s two branches (the other is on Street 178): the newer, cleaner, far more exciting of the two, though it never opens for lunch. It offers a fantastic assortment of yakitori (seasoned grilled meats on skewers).

The menu is extensive but you can’t go wrong. There’s the classic style: grilled chicken, meat and seafood with just salt or soy sauce, a novel marinade of Cambodian peppers and an even more interesting surprise flavour of miso paste, Jidaiya’s specialty. Sample a bit of everything in every flavour; every little stick is a winner.

Fuwari
#79b Street 63; 023 6655989
It’s a serendipitous feeling, coming upon Fuwari – a cake shop and café – after a meal at neighbouring Yakitori Jidaiya or Sumibi Yokochou, almost as if you can’t believe your luck. Fuwari, which opened in December, is a well-lit cosy café, with a couple of tables and a few settings on tatami mats built into the floor, Japanese-style. There is coffee, there are floats, there are cakes, there are crepes, there are little Japanese treats like those special air-light cream puffs you might find on any street in Tokyo.

I had the mattya, a heavenly green-tea-flavored panna cotta, with bits of red bean sprinkled on top. The cheesecake was just as light, subtly sweet, the best we have tried in Phnom Penh. I adored the crepes, filled with a light cream and fresh strawberries, and the delightful strawberry cake. It was as if the pastry chef had the hands of an angel. Find it, discover it, indulge in it. There isn’t a sweeter spot on Street 63.

 

Bard for life

THURSDAY 17 |Bored with w  conventional poetry recitals so snobbish almost no one in the audience was listening, Chicago-born Marc Kelly Smith – a self-described socialist who had been writing verse since the age of 19 – executed a dramatic ‘up yours’ to the literary establishment  in 1984 with the launch of the world’s first poetry slam. A departure from the naval-gazing norm of genteel readings, the slam injected an element of fierce competition: poets performed; cheering (or booing) onlookers acted as judge, jury and execution. In September 1992, when Smithsonian magazine covered the poetry slam phenomenon, the reporter described Smith as “almost visionary on the need to rescue poetry from its lowly status in the nation’s cultural life”. The spoken word revolution had begun. It would take a further three decades for the movement sparked by ‘Slam Papi’ to reach Cambodian shores, but when it did – in the form of US deportee Kosal Khiev, a Cambodia-born convict who discovered poetry while serving time for attempted murder – it carried with it the necessary tinder to light a new, more local revolution. In a culture where creative self-expression remains largely an alien concept, Kosal and fellow spoken word artists Kaztet Dee, Poet G and Myley Rattle are uniting for one very special performance.

WHO: Kosal Khiev, Kaztet Dee, Poet G and Myley Rattle
WHAT: Poetry slam
WHERE: Show Box, Street 330 & 113
WHEN: 7:30pm April 17
WHY: “The very word ‘poetry’ repels people. Why is that? Because of what schools have done to it. The slam gives it back to the people… We need people to talk poetry to each other. That’s how we communicate our values, our hearts, the things that we’ve learned that make us who we are.” – Marc Smith

Lunar ticks

TUESDAY 15 |Full moon? Check. Beach? Check. Party? Don’t ask stupid questions. Flee the capital for a night and let DJs Simon C Vent, Funkelastiks, Flo, Egospell and Wez-T take you on a sonic EDM trip to the tiny isle of Koh Rong Saloeum. Tickets cost $25 and the boat leaves Serendipity Pier, in Sihanoukville, at 5pm. Hairy palms not included. ArrOOOOOO!

WHO: DJs Simon C Vent, Funkelastiks, Flo, Egospell and Wez-T
WHAT: Full Moon Party
WHERE: Koh Rong Saloeum island
WHEN: 5pm April 15
WHY: I see a bad moon rising…

 

The banality of Evil

SUNDAY 13 |When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing, for which Herzog later signed on as executive producer, isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s actual documented history, which is what makes its horrors that much harder to bear. First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second-greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people. And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see.

WHO: First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer
WHAT: The Act Of Killing screening
WHERE: Empire, #30 Street 130.
WHEN: 4pm April 13
WHY: “Raw, terrifying, and painfully difficult to watch, The Act Of Killing offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema.” – rottentomatoes.com

 

Age of sharing

SATURDAY 12 |Once upon a time, or 2001 to be exact, the Dutchman behind The Flicks Community Movie Houses in Phnom Penh wasn’t known as the godfather of couch surfing. Global media had yet to brand him ‘The world’s biggest freeloader’ (he still prefers ‘economic refugee’) and the concept of social networking hadn’t even been invented. Ramon Stoppelenburg, then a journalism student in his mid-20s, wanted to travel the world. There was only one catch: his wallet was so empty it echoed. Enter the blossoming technology we now know as The Internet. Letmestayforaday.com was Ramon’s domain. His mission: to boldly go where no man (or woman) had gone before and traverse the globe for free, simply by hopping – based on invitations he received online – from sofa to sofa. By December 2001, both the Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers in the UK had declared him Internet Personality of the Year. Two years and 10,000 new friends later, Ramon – who features in the documentary One Couch At A Time – had become the poster boy for what academics and lefties now loftily refer to as the ‘sharing economy’.

WHO: Couchsurfers and other open-minded hipster types
WHAT: One Couch At A Time screening
WHERE: Flicks2, Street 136
WHEN: 2pm April 12
WHY: The new ‘age of sharing’ examined

Punk’s not dead

FRIDAY 11 & 12|Ian Anderson, bleached-blond frontman from Stiff Little Punks and Lazy Drunks, is back! During the ‘80s, before he quit the UK, Anderson’s Leicester-based band Crazyhead had opened for none other than Iggy Pop, The Cult, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Singer of everything ‘from trenchant social commentary to the surreal, but always with an underlying vein of black humour’, Anderson is back from his new Thai home for two nights of noise only. Did he have any idea, during the ‘70s, that punk rock would prove so enduring? “No, I’m pleasantly surprised. I didn’t know what to think. I thought by the year 2000 we’d all be flying around on spaceship skateboards and wearing silver suits…”

WHO: Ian Anderson with Stuff Little Punks and Lazy Drunks
WHAT: Punk, innit?!
WHERE: Sharky Bar, Street 130
WHEN: 9pm April 11 & 12
WHY: Punk’s not dead, it just needed a nap!

My brother’s killer

FRIDAY 11 |Kerry Hamill was 27 when he wrote his last journal entry from his yacht Foxy Lady in August 1978. The eldest son of a tight-knit New Zealand family, he – along with fellow travellers Stuart Glass, a Canadian, and John Dewhirst from England – would within weeks join the handful of foreigners executed by the Khmer Rouge. At the time, few people outside Cambodia knew of the atrocities being committed within. Before Foxy Lady’s course was forever altered, Kerry had sent countless letters back home, regaling his family with breathless tales. Suddenly, the letters stopped. The silence was deafening. It would be a further 18 months before the Hamills finally discovered what awful fate had befallen their son. Thirty-one years later, on the same day Kerry’s yacht had first strayed into Cambodian waters, his younger brother Rob – an Olympic and Trans-Atlantic rowing champion – arrived in Phnom Penh to confront Kerry’s killers at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. At the same time, he agreed to the filming of Brother Number One, an award-winning documentary by Annie Goldson, James Bellamy and Peter Gilbert that follows Rob as he retraces Kerry’s final steps. Along the way he visits Tuol Sleng, where his brother was tortured; meets three S-21 survivors, and penetrates a Khmer Rouge stronghold to find the Navy officer in charge when Kerry’s yacht was attacked. The resulting film is “the story of an innocent man brought to his knees and killed in the prime of his life, and the impact his death had on just one family”.

WHO: Rob Hamill
WHAT: Brother Number One screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm April 11
WHY: The ghost of the Khmer Rouge confronted

In gods we trust

TUESDAY 8 | Filmed in Cambodia, France and England, director Alan Canner’s The Cross And The Bodhi Tree explores Christian encounters with Buddhism by interweaving the bustle and antiquities of Buddhist Cambodia with the serenity of an English convent. The documentary depicts the spiritual journeys of a French Catholic priest who has worked in Cambodia since 1965 and an Anglican nun who lives a life of silence and prayer at a convent in Oxford. Father François Ponchaud, a member of the Foreign Missions of Paris, has translated the Bible into Khmer and written the definitive history of the Catholic Church in Cambodia. In 1977, he wrote Cambodia Year Zero – the book that alerted the world to the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. Mother Rosemary has long nurtured an interest in Buddhism and in 1991 spent two months at a Buddhist monastery. Both have had to face questions posed by the head-on collision of two belief systems, and their answers – direct, lucid and humble – result in a film that is as thought-provoking as it is profound.

WHO: The spiritually inclined
WHAT: The Cross And The Bodhi Tree screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 7pm April 8
WHY: Witness what happens when two belief systems collide

 

Penh-dacity II: Bong, James Bong (Apr 4)

Desmond, an accidental English-language expat, approximately Gen WTF, came to Phnom Penh to work at an NGO that went belly-up while he was in the air, and he now keeps himself afloat in the city, day after day, week after week, without really knowing how. After borrowing too much money from too many acquaintances, he has finally landed himself a job. Will he find himself, or will he continue to search for reverse in this borrowed car of a life he’s stalled in? Is the answer really in the bottom of the next glass, or what? Watch from the sidelines as Desmond gives 110% commitment in Penh-dacity II: Bong, James Bong. Now read on.  

Snuck: a bar, with fresh-looking paintwork. To the left of the main doorway, you can see an abandoned plastic bag that once held sugarcane juice sprawled limply in the breezeless street, the straw pointing awkwardly into a bright sky that was as oppressive as it was clear. Inside, the high-ceilinged interior suggested airiness but failed to deliver. Draped across the counter, both staff sprawled limply in sack-like orange-brown uniforms, in front of smartphones, only their thumbs and eyeballs moving.

Desmond, resplendent in short-sleeved white shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, descended into the bar in a wobbly fashion, wondering as he often did these days when it was the promised mango rains would come so that these temperatures could be pulled down to a reasonable level, somewhere at least slightly above Living Hell.

He took his usual seat under the best of the air-conditioners and sweated quietly to himself, absently rearranging icons on his own smartphone. The ancient unit was mostly ineffective, but it made a cool-sounding whooshing noise that was better than nothing. Eventually he gathered some strength and raised a question that had begun to occur to him since sitting down.

“Where is Bong Phany?” Sophea ignored him but Sopheak managed to peep: “He go drink shop, no have Ricard.” The heat silenced all further comment. Desmond calculated how much effort it would take to encourage Sopheak to make him Coca-with-lots-of-ice or whether to do it himself. On the other hand, Phany would be back shortly.

Since his last adventures in these pages, our hero had found himself suffering even more acute cashflow and debt issues. On more than one occasion he’d had to exit a bar when he saw one of his creditors. Then the building he was living in was suddenly turned into a building site, with barefoot skinny labourers padding up and down the stairs from 6am, seven days a week, to hang from bamboo scaffolding tied loosely into place in order to put build an extra floor or two into the vacant space above his apartment. Desperate, he took up an offer from his mentor-of-a-kind Hank, a mysterious figure who, among other things, part-owned a recently opened bar.

Desmond’s mission, that he chose to accept, was to be live-in security and staff overseer in exchange for a paltry monthly wage, a limited bar tab, free wifi and an air-conditioned apartment. The apartment turned out to be an empty room with a smelly mattress and a view of a brick wall, but it did have an air-conditioner, which was actually far better than the ones in the bar. His job, in the end, didn’t amount to much more than sleeping on the premises, because Phany did everything already.

Desmond subtly tried to tell this to Hank after a few weeks in the position. “Yes, I know, Desi old bean, I know. The place runs itself. But Sambath is very keen on having a big-nose on the ground. Says it encourages other big-noses to come in.  You’ll be surprised how much you learn, I’ll wager. Just keep on, put on the tie every day and sit there for a few hours and jump whenever Sambath says jump.” Sambath, Hank’s partner, as Desmond had already found, liked to say jump. Five-foot-nothing worth of muscle, he lived on Red Bull and rice, was well connected and privately funded. He was decisive about all matters, forgot everything immediately after it was agreed, and lit up every room with his constantly surprised ‘Ha!’ laugh.

Back in the present, Desmond’s phone burped. Belinda, his first Phnom Penh friend and confidante, was resuming their efforts to arrange to meet, which had been going on for weeks now. ‘Tonight definitely maybe,’ he tapped in reply. ‘But in this town of course who knows what might happen.’

And that, of course, was the moment when Sambath walked in and who knows what did happen. Sophea and Sopheak slowly slithered into a standing position as the big boss walked straight up to the counter followed by a tall, gold-chained, tousled-haired, somewhat stooped and unshaven individual. “Hey, Mr Desi-mond. Come over here, you meet my new friend, big star man.”

Slowly slithering himself, Desmond crossed the room, allowing himself some curiosity. “Here, this is Mr Desi-mond, my man with a right hand. He run this whole place!” said Sambath to the stranger. The stranger looked about him, unimpressed. “Mr Desi-mond, this James Bong.” “James Bond?” queried Desmond. “Bonne.  James Bonne,” said James Bonne, testily.

Continues next week  

 

A jolt of sweetness

In the caffeine-saturated district of BKKI, Artease serves as something of a contrarian. The menu is stacked with teas: bubble, milk, hot, cold and otherwise. From 0% sugar to 100% overdose, teas come in sealed plastic cups or steaming mugs, from Earl Grey to herbal to French rose. Sometimes sweet, sometimes mild — and always best with chewy tapioca bubbles — Artease stews are BKK chai lattes without the pretence. The room is large, with plump chairs and floor-to-ceiling windows, the wifi quick, the air-con Arctic. The café serves a short food menu with sandwiches (ham & cheese, $2.95) and brownies ($1.95), too. And hand-pulled espresso made with Spanish beans. Try the honey espresso on ice ($2.60) for a speedy jolt of sweetness.

Artease, #23 Street 310.