Byline: HANNAH SENDER

Quick crusts

Noticed how hot it’s been recently? Suddenly, grabbing a bite to eat in your local market doesn’t seem so appealing; the heat increases with every step into the furnace. Luckily for you, you’ve stumbled upon a list of some of the hottest (in the ratings sense of the word) places to grab a pastry and a coffee in Phnom Penh. Forget where you are for a few minutes and enjoy the light breeze or conditioned air.

The Shop, #39 Street 240:

It may be obvious to anyone who has lived in Phnom Penh for more than a month, but the Belgian-run café bearing the postmodern name The Shop is one of the most popular places to pick up a pastry and quality roast. Its popularity is thoroughly deserved: the pastries are freshly baked, generous in size and fair in price. Coffees are some of the most reasonably priced in the city, cheaper than most major brands.

There’s no wifi in The Shop, which means that eating here constitutes a genuine break from work, from Gmail, from Facebook. Take a book and sit alone, assured that you can do nothing but read during your escape from the office. If there’s just no time, don’t feel guilty about grabbing your drink or lunch to take away because, unlike most other institutions, the packaging here is biodegradable.

Will’s Brunch Café, #23 Street 294:

Recently opened, Will’s Brunch Café lords it in one of the fastest developing areas of the city, just east of Norodom Boulevard towards the White Building. Sitting alongside the new Vego’s, opposite a vintage clothing shop and a wine bar, it’s one of the many places popping up in Tonle Bassac which can make you forget where you are.

Walking in feels like entering a café in provincial South England. Yes, that is remarkably specific but you will know what I mean. Décor is ’70s-inspired and the menu is extensive, but not to the degree that you lose faith in the quality. Each dish is inspired by geographical location. So actually, you could be anywhere in the world, including here.

Pastries are freshly made on the premises and the coffee is some of the best in town. Prices aren’t cheap, but the feeling you’ve escape the city – even if just for a moment – is priceless.

Nak Louk Nom Pang, everywhere:

The travelling bread and pastry sellers, who can be found pretty much anywhere, are convenient and cheap: expect to pay less than a dollar for sweet bread. They may not have seats or air con, but for pastry that passes right by your door, you can’t get that service for less than $5 from most coffee houses. However, make sure you know what you’re ordering or be adventurous. You might bite into your baguette to find it’s filled with something unrecognisable.

The Coffee House, #82 Street 155:

Cambodian-owned café The Coffee House is located in the Toul Tom Pong (Russian Market) area of the city. Fast-becoming one of the hotspots for local and small independently-run businesses, The Coffee House and its partner bar, Apros Pub, are established drinking houses for Russian Market locals. The Coffee House offers a much-desired break from the intense, sweltering heat of the dining area in the belly of the Russian Market. The menu is limited, but the pastries are wonderful and very reasonably priced, particularly the muffins, which make a great breakfast-on-the-run.

 

Dish: Under the awnings

It is possible to be a tourist in your own town. Since an influx of expatriates have adopted parts of the city as home, it’s easy to live in blissful ignorance of the ‘real’ Phnom Penh, still alive in the local markets and winding alleys. These are the sites which do not appear on your tuk tuk driver’s picture card alongside the National Museum and S21.

O’Russei Market is one of them. It might seem a little daunting at first: it’s the most densely populated market in Phnom Penh. The heavy concrete is absolutely necessary to the holding of this number of people, shoes and appliances. It’s not a place you would stop off for a quiet coffee and piece of cake, but don’t think that means you can’t get them there. You can. It’s especially worth a visit if you fancy fried crickets.

Starting on the west side of the market, opposite a line of fabric stalls where rolls of glittering, gaudy, then plain black and denim fabrics sit beneath canvas awnings, is the fruit market. A group of stalls create a walkway into the ground floor of the three-storey market. Before you are engulfed by the darkness, take a seat at the brohet stall.

If you have ever been wearied by the dull brown of beef or the yawn-inspiring off-white of chicken, this is the cuisine for you. Just don’t try to work out what you’ve ordered until you eat it. Pork (or crab) comes wrapped in a green coating which, when fried, becomes crispy and brittle; the traditional British rhubarb sweet seems to be the inspiration for one stick of rolled red and white meat and, of course, the platter wouldn’t be complete without the Angry Bird kebab (a local delicacy, don’t you know).

But don’t be afraid! It may look strange and vaguely dangerous, but the pork (or crab) balls are delicious, no matter what shape or colour they come in. At $1 for three kebabs and two fried vegetable sides, it’s a dish worthwhile experimenting with.

Head left before you reach the entrance proper and walk past the fruit stalls to the northwest corner of O’Russei. Nom banh chok awaits: a reassuringly recognisable dish of rice noodles and curry. This is great if your iron levels are running low: chunks of dark, jelly like chicken blood float beneath the surface of the immense curry pot on the table. A steal at $1 for your basic vegetable, carbohydrate and protein intake, you might be tempted to splash out on the prawn spring rolls: a mere 1500 riel each.

Now enter the belly of the O’Russei market beast. Apart from your daily groceries, sugared tamarind can be bought from a moving cart for $4 per kilo. As with most Cambodian market stalls, you can try before you buy.

Walking straight through to the east side of the market and into the light will arrive you at the jelly jah hoi stall. Those with an extremely sweet tooth will find their sugar cravings satisfied by a concoction of jelly, condensed milk, coconut milk and beans, which you can design yourself. It’s a bit like pick ‘n’ mix, but wetter.

The scariest things in life (and cuisine) are scary because they’re unknown. Spend an afternoon away from your favourite air-conditioned cafe, save a little money and face your fear: Angry Bird kebabs.

O’Russei Market (Psar O’Russei), north of Olympic Stadium.

 

Dish: To Sesame Street

As coffee shops spawn in the Wat Lanka area (even international coffee company Costa Coffee finally got the memo) and a plethora of bars spring up between the already densely populated Riverside and Street 51, it seems that the Russian Market is beginning to develop a specialty all its own. For small, independently owned cafes, bars and restaurants, you need to head to the south of the city.

In December last year, Russian Market locals welcomed the opening of Sesame Noodle Bar: a small restaurant whose culinary forte is a dish widely available in Cambodia. Noodles are not widely available like this, though. Set apart from the oftentimes warm, bordering on sauna-like covered market’s food stalls and the expensive Riverside hotspots is this little hideaway, located on street 460 amid private houses and a few beer gardens.

The building itself hasn’t been changed from its original layout. The Chinese-Cambodian-style ground floor still stretches out beneath the balcony of the first floor but the exposed light-bulbs and retro toys bespeak trendy London/New York drinking spots, and the posters which adorn the back wall, American canteen.

The hybrid of styles evinced in the decor is mirrored in the cooking, which takes inspiration from Japanese and Chinese cuisine and, like the restaurant, the menu is small but unique. Underscoring the whole is, unsurprisingly, noodles. The choice for the main meal is between one of two dishes, each of which contain pork. Vegetarians and observant Hebrews need not despair, however. The list of side dishes offers two vegetarian options and sesame chicken.

Sesame Noodle Bar is a great example of simple food, done to perfection. “If the menu can’t fit on an A5 paper, it’s too big,” exclaim the owners (via their well-maintained website, sesamenoodlebar.com). Ordering one of three lunch specials, the Pork Buns with Sesame House Noodle, proves that pork can be the highlight of a meal, twice. Tender, sweet and tangy, the meat reinvigorates an otherwise simple vegetarian noodle dish.

The driving concept behind Sesame Noodle Bar is to create food for the climate. Unlike larger restaurant and cafe chains, the owners of Sesame Noodle Bar allow the location to define what’s served. Noodles are served chilled and the side dishes are light. In fact, one diner likened her experience of the Mighty Thor Buns to “eating little clouds”.

Not to make Sesame Noodle Bar appear too distant from its counterparts, the owners have also taken inspiration from their neighbours, who have been serving nom banh chop in the Russian Market for decades. Food is prepared behind a high counter, but in the same space as the customers. It is fast, but it is also fresh.

A word of warning: the decision to maintain the original architecture means that seating space is limited, but the open-plan bar/kitchen/restaurant lends a sense of intimacy rather than claustrophobia, and solitary diners wouldn’t feel awkward sitting at the bar with a book (or a copy of The Advisor). Go with a friend or go alone, but go, if only to play with the toys which sit atop the bar.

Sesame Noodle Bar, ‘The Real’ #9, Street 460 (just east of the Russian Market)

 

Repackaging the past

“I f ind it worthy to hold an emptiness, to allot for empty space, because it is often within this space that something opens up within oneself.”

Earlier this year, American-Cambodian artist Amy Lee Sanford repeatedly broke and reassembled 40 Kampong Cham clay pots as a metaphorical reworking of her endeavour to return to her family’s past and reassemble the pieces of their memories. Her performance lasted for more than six days, starting with the breakage of the first pot and ending with fixing the final shard.

 

But one cannot conceive of Full Circle as just a reflection of a personal journey. After all, Amy chose to represent that story in this way, with these pots, over this period of time. It is an aesthetic piece, in which Sanford endeavoured to “create a performance with extra physical and mental space, which can be useful for self-reflection. I find it worthy to hold an emptiness, to allot for empty space, because it is often within this space that something opens up within oneself, or something that was hidden for a while comes to the foreground”.

Creation of reflective space is an immediate effect of Full Circle, which is first and foremost an ephemeral work, based in a repeated process but being itself unrepeatable. But Full Circle does not remain entirely isolated in its unrepeatable, irreplicable being. Photographs were taken, every second, from the side and from above. Even when Amy had no audience, the cameras ‘captured’ her working. These photographs will constitute another dimension to this work of art, existing alongside but never interfering with Full Circle as a performance piece in an upcoming exhibition, New Artefacts.

Australian curator Roger Nelson foregrounds the aesthetic of process over the marketable end product in New Artefacts, to be hosted at Sa Sa Bassac Gallery in August. Sanford is one of several artists to have documentation of their artistic process exhibited. Asked to what extent she agrees with Nelson’s curatorial proposition, Sanford remarks that the concept of New Artefacts is “interesting, because the public is generally unaware of the myriad of processes that lie within the art piece presented in a gallery setting. This introduces viewers to this other dimension”.

The dynamic between the performance artwork and the photographs which document that performance creates a dialogue between the work of art as unique and original object, and the work of art as repeated, technically produced product. This debate originates with German essayist Walter Benjamin, for whom modern art had reached crisis point with the introduction of photography.

Amy Lee Sanford does not reconcile this crisis, which sees the work of art as original creation and replicable object brought into the same space. “Art is, for me, a multi-tiered process,” says Sanford. “Sometimes it is ambiguous as to when one tier ends and another begins. The photos which began as documentation of a performance are now the starting point for more artworks, with the original performance as an anchor.”

Whether the photographs function as an autonomous series or as a means of prolonging the memory of a past performance, New Artefacts shifts the paradigm of performance being documented to documented performance to instigate new ideas. Sanford’s Full Circle is to be viewed alongside other Cambodian and Australian artists’ working documents. In a new climate, through a mechanical eye, Full Circle is reworked without being invaded.

WHO: Amy Lee Sanford et al
WHAT: New Artefacts exhibition
WHEN: From August 9
WHERE: Sa Sa Bassac Gallery, #18 2nd Floor, Sothearos Blvd.
WHY: Art is like an onion

 

Seeing red: angry canvases capture the fearful condition of modern man

Last month, The Scream – Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s seminal expressionist work depicting existential angst – was brought to London. England was instantly aflush with the immense influence of this painting, considered by many as a portrayal of the fearful condition of modern man.

Now, here in Cambodia, another artist has taken human expression as a focus of his study on contemporary mankind. Long Kusal, the next artist to be celebrated in a solo exhibition at Romeet Gallery, is a philosopher as well as a painter. First and foremost, his paintings are about truth and the human condition and “portray problems towards the solutions”, Kusal says. His work is an experiment in destabilising overbearing truths or common perceptions.

Anarchy goes hand in hand with discontent and anger. Each of the 15 paintings in this show is painted in red, the colour of rage. Although some of the faces are smiling, Kusal insists that his expressions emerge from the same anger. “Even your smile is angry,” he says.

But the colour also has its connections with Buddhism, the methods of which Kusal relies upon for inspiration. In a state of meditation, Kusal once contemplated the thread which adorns the wrist of blessed Buddhists (also, their motorbikes and car wing-mirrors) – the first medium he worked in. Although he has since abandoned the thread itself, you can still see its influence in his paintings. The twisted lines which entangle his figures and emerge from their expressions are those same red threads, but in two-dimensional form.

These paintings contribute to a portrayal of the eternal human psychology. These are pure egos, illustrations of the “fear, shock, stress and sadness” which have driven mankind forever. “There are no positive ideas in my work, only conflict.”

Although the artist denies any positivity, a light emerges from this tyrannical will to see in concrete form the absence of hope. This hope can only emerge in the process of spectatorship. When people engage with Kusal’s work, they are faced with an unbearable image of humanity. Once engaged, they have the opportunity to contemplate the issue.

He doesn’t necessarily mean for his audience to leave depressed. “Once I have made the work, it is up to people what they make of it.” The creative process doesn’t end with Kusal. In fact, it has hardly begun. Art has the capacity to mean anything, he insists. “It can be funny, angry, positive and negative”. Art is pure potential; the ultimate power, then, rests with the audience.

WHO: Long Kusal
WHAT: Solo exhibition
WHERE: Romeet Gallery, #34E St. 178
WHEN: May 3
WHY: Rage on canvas