Byline: Alex Watts

In the sequel to bestselling food book Down And Out In Padstow And London, failed chef and hack Lennie Nash sets off to eat his way through Southeast Asia, with a half-baked plan to buy a restaurant. Along the way, he encounters a host of weird characters, from frazzled bar owners to Walter Mitty CIA agents to seedy sexpats to ice zombies four years over on their visa. The book is an adventure story – spiked with a heavy dose of backpacker noir – through the eateries, street food stalls and hazy bars of Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. In this exclusive extract from Down And Out In Southeast Asia, by Alex Watts, Nash arrives in Phnom Penh full of warnings about how dodgy the place is, the armies of gold-toothed paedophiles swarming the streets, the acid attacks happening on every corner, and how you could pay a police officer $150 to get someone assassinated…

I’D NOT heard great things about Cambodia, and was wondering what to expect as we flew over the bright green, patchwork paddy fields into Phnom Penh – a city of heart-breaking poverty and extreme wealth fast rising from the ashes of one of the world’s worst genocides.

John’s wife Pla had warned me how dangerous the place is and how Cambodians will steal the pennies from a dead man’s eyes. But you can be unlucky in any city and I’d met a lot of people in Thailand I wouldn’t trust with a bag of chips.

In Bangkok, a drunk Canadian had told me how he’d recently crossed the Koh Kong border from Cambodia and was full of stories about how dodgy the country was and how he was drugged and robbed one night. He talked about the armies of gold-toothed, Hawaiian shirt-wearing paedophiles swarming the streets, the acid attacks happening on every corner and how you could pay a police officer $150 to get someone assassinated.

“Man, it was a pretty fucking lawless place, I can tell you,” he added. “I stayed at one hotel, man, and the security guard asked his eight-year-old son to pull up his T-shirt. He was covered in little tiny circles, man. They’d burned him with incense sticks to toughen him up. That fucking sucks!”

He told me the food was even worse. But for some reason, Cambodian cooking had always intrigued me. I can’t say I’d ever picked up the Yellow Pages and thought ‘I could murder a Cambodian,’ but I’d always been interested in cuisines that hadn’t been done to death.

For years, trend-spotting listicle scribblers had been saying Cambodian food would be the next big thing – and not just travel writers with room to fill. In its food trend predictions for 2008, three years before I got there, the Conde Nast-owned website Epicurious boldly predicted that ‘Cambodian is the new Thai’ and described its noodle dishes, curries and stir-fries as a triangulation between Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai cooking.

I remembered when Rick Stein had filmed his Far Eastern Odyssey TV series a French food expert had told him the country was a meeting point of all the culinary roads of Asia – a place where you could get the best of Indian and Chinese food with a piece of fresh bread on the table.

Gordon Ramsay had just made a similar programme called Gordon’s Great Escape, but his trip through Cambodia was made up of shock-factor scenes of him spitting out duck foetuses and fried tarantulas, and harpooning frogs.

In nearly every emotional, hoarse-voiced clip, Ramsay had remarked how the country was recovering from the “crap” of a civil war that had killed nearly two million people and rediscovering traditional dishes that “were nearly lost for good” under the Khmer Rouge – something he probably thought was a local wine until he read the cartoon script his producers had written for him.

But whatever lay in store in Cambodia, I’d been told it was probably the easiest place to open a restaurant in Southeast Asia. John had told me it was impossible for farangs to run a business in their own name in Thailand: a Thai national had to own at least 50% and that required a “huge amount of trust and stupidity”.

Many expats put the lease in their Thai wife or girlfriend’s name and end up with nothing when the relationship sours, or the family arrives and they’re forced out of the business. Some end up flying off a balcony, dying from a heart attack 40 floors below. Apparently, two expats a week die flying off condo balconies in Thailand.

“The only way you get can round it,” John said, “is to marry a Thai woman, put half the business in her name, then have a baby. Then you leave Thailand for a few years and return when the child is five. You put the business in the child’s name, but you have power of attorney until the child is 18, meaning they need your signature as joint business owner to flog the business. That way you’ve got a window of 13 years and they can’t do anything about it.”

He’d told me some horrendous stories. There was the retired Japanese guy who’d fallen in love with a 20-year-old bar girl and opened a restaurant with her. He’d given her father and brother a moped each and bought the family a farm in Isaan, in north-east Thailand.

They got married three months later. He spent thousands on the three-day wedding. The whole village was there, scoffing spit-roast pigs and chickens, and at the end a Thai man appeared and said: “You can go now.”

“What?” said the pensioner.

“You can go now. I’m her husband…”

Then there was the Swedish businessmans who’d ended up with two broken legs and a broken back when he went to renew his lease on a bar in Pattaya he’d been running for two years. The landlady, from a rich family who owned several hotels in the city, had told him to bring $10,000 in cash, but then refused to sign the contract unless he handed over another $4,000.

He withdrew the cash from an ATM and she took the money, counted it and refused to sign. He began filming on his phone. One of her bodyguards threw him over a 10ft ledge and then jumped down onto his back. The police investigated, but no-one was arrested – even though he had video of the landlady ordering her bodyguards to beat him. She was far too well connected for that.

I’d read that as a foreigner without major contacts you couldn’t buy land in Cambodia, but at least the lease would be in your own name. All you needed was a business visa, which you could get on arrival. Then it was just a case of buying a restaurant, putting your thumbprints on a few documents, buying a business licence for $60 a year and paying $10 a month in tax and $5 for the police who came sniffing round every month. And as for all the health and safety red tape and work laws strangling restaurants in the UK, forget it…

Down And Out In South East Asia, by Alex Watts, is available as a Kindle book on Amazon now. The paperback version will be out in August.

Food arrives as soon as you sit down – a glass of chilled water, baskets of poppadoms and Indian chips, and relish pots of spicy, green raita, pickled radish in mustard oil that is pleasantly bitter, jam-like tamarind relish, and pickled shallots the colour of cochineal

IT seems only fitting that a country so historically influenced by Indian food should have its fair share of decent curry houses. But if only that were true. There are many Indian restaurants – or, far worse, Western eateries that claim to serve authentic Indian curries – here in Cambodia. But most of them have as much in common with the distinctive aromas and flavours of the Indian subcontinent as a whelk stall in Bognor Regis.

Thankfully there is a place, just off Riverside on Street 130, that could hold its own in Mumbai or London, and I’ve eaten there many times and never been disappointed. It might not have the catchiest name – Sher-E-Punjabi – but my word it does some great dun-coloured, spice-packed stews.

It’s a small, welcoming space, with labial pink decor and Chinese prints on the wall. The service is always excellent and friendly, and there’s often a TV in the corner playing Indian soap operas with the usual pantomime acting.

Food arrives as soon as you sit down – a glass of chilled water, baskets of poppadoms and Indian chips, and relish pots of spicy, green raita, pickled radish in mustard oil that is pleasantly bitter, jam-like tamarind relish, and pickled shallots the colour of cochineal.

The manager always asks whether “you want spicy or not” and even if, like me, you say very spicy, there‘s never such a punch of heat that you can’t taste anything else. The menu is long, with traditional curry house favourites such as vindaloo, madras, and roasted meats from the tandoor oven, sitting alongside more unusual Indian and Mughlai dishes.

The last time I went, our party ordered the meat thali – six dishes on a metal tray – which is excellent value at $7. It included a splendid thick daal, an ode in praise of the lentil, smacking of cumin and ginger; a delicious but small portion of chicken curry, expertly cooked and packed full of flavour; basmati rice; thick slices of raw onion and cucumber, and onion raita. The only downside was the rather sickly pea-strewn vegetable offering swamped in cream and tiny pieces of paneer curd cheese made by heating milk and lemon juice.

Of the mains, the best of the lot was the mutton curry, in which long-braised bits of meat had flaked into a thick, toothsome sauce. Sadly, the chicken vindaloo was not so good, with pronounced but not completely unwelcome sweet notes. It was far removed from the legendary sour, tomato-packed Goan dish, and there were more potato chunks than chicken. The naan breads were the size of saucepan lids though, thin and crisp and nicely scorched in the tandoor.

A group of Indian businessmen walked in and were soon tucking in merrily while discussing the merits of curries in luxury restaurants in Delhi. “I didn’t get much lamb, man; they’re not very generous with the meat,” said one of them afterwards.

And that is the one criticism of the place. The meat curries are delicious but rather stingy. But the food is marked by a skill that I’ve only seen matched in Cambodia by Siem Reap’s original India Gate restaurant, which considering its chef-owner spent 22 years cooking in a five-star hotel in India is quite an accomplishment. You emerge light, and the freshness and vivacity to the cooking means you don’t feel, as you can in many Indian restaurants, that there is an anvil loitering in the bottom of your stomach, waiting to enact its revenge.

Sher-E-Punjabi-I Restaurant, #16 Street 130; 092 992901 or 023 216360.

 

Cambodian food doesn’t have a great press, and has long been overshadowed by its neighbours Vietnam and Thailand. But there is much more to this fresh, healthy cuisine with its seasonal dishes of bitter, sour, sweet, salty and umami flavours than meets the eye. Here are five of Cambodia’s best meals, all of which can be had for a few dollars – and deserve far wider recognition.

Boiled crab with salt, pepper and lime dip

Dish: This incredibly simple dip is made from sea salt, Cambodia’s world-beating Kampot pepper, and lime juice. You’ll get it with everything from hunks of spit-roast calf to green mango. But it goes best with freshly boiled blue swimmer crabs, which although contain little brown head meat, and virtually no morsels in the claws, more than make up for it with the generously fleshy chine. In restaurants, they usually serve a mix of two thirds freshly-ground black pepper to one third salt then carefully squeeze in two or three lime quarters and mix it in front of you. It might seem a laughably simple procedure, but they take it as seriously as a chef de rang would the preparation of crepe suzette, squeezing in the ‘correct’ amount of lime juice until there is the right moistness to the sauce.

Where: You’ll have few better days than sitting at a restaurant in Kep’s famous crab market, looking out to sea, while supping cold beer and dunking freshly boiled crab into this splendid dip.

Chicken porridge soup

Dish: Cambodia is truly the land of soups. I don’t think you’ll find a country with such a high proportion on menus, and there is nearly always a broth at every family meal. But of all the great soups in Cambodia, and there are plenty, this is my favourite. The bowl is always topped with nutty, browned garlic, and as you dig into the rice, there is the occasional limp crunch of bean sprouts and the pleasing discovery of a little piece of chicken or bone to suck on. Then there is the chicken stock, hinting of lime leaf and lemon grass, julienne strips of ginger, the soapy richness of blood pudding, and the yolks taken from the hens’ ovaries, which glint like amber pearls. I could go on…

Where: Food stalls in Phnom Penh’s Central Market. It’s a seething sauna, but the soups are second to none.

Prahok ling

Dish: This is an incredibly powerful meal, flavoured with Cambodia’s notoriously foul-smelling fermented fish paste, prahok. The paste is fried with hand-chopped pork, onion, garlic, egg, and chilli. And it’s so strong there are strict government laws in place to ensure you only get a small saucer of the stuff, which you eat with boiled jasmine rice and chunks of raw aubergine, cucumber, green tomato, and white cabbage to take the edge off the extremely pungent, blue cheese-like taste.

Where: Khmer Food Village, opposite NagaWorld in Phnom Penh, or Bopha Leak Khluon restaurant, near Hotel de la Paix, Siem Reap.

Cambodian dried fish omelette

Dish: The best version I’ve had was made with duck eggs and tiny smoked fish that had been soaked in brine, and then grilled over smouldering wood for eight hours until they were hard and chewy. But mostly dried fish are used. The fish are broken up into small pieces and then added to a pan with chopped onion and garlic and fried for a couple of minutes. A couple of beaten eggs and black pepper are added, and the omelette is served very thin and dry with a plate of crudités and rice.

Where: You’ll be hard pushed to find a better version than at Keur Keur Coffee Shop, #75 Street 118, Phnom Penh.

Grilled pork with rice and pickles

Dish: This is easily Cambodia’s best breakfast. There is something incredible in the way the pickled vegetables, chewy slices of grilled pork, and the clear pork broth work together with pickled chillies from the condiment trays. The pork is marinated for hours and then slowly grilled, and has a deliciously salty flavour and intense red colour. You pour spoonfuls of stock over the rice and pork and then dig in. The pickle is usually made from carrot, cucumber and daikon. They are cut on a mandolin into julienne strips and then salted. The water produced is drained off and then they are soused in a pickling mixture of water, vinegar, sugar, salt and spices. Think kimchi without all the PR.

Where: Any busy Khmer eatery at breakfast time. But get there before 10am – it’s usually all gone by then.