Cambodia tours – what’s the food like?

Cambodian Food

Sadly, Khmer cooking has traditionally taken a backseat compared to the more prestigious and much better-known cuisines of its neighbours Thailand and Vietnam. Obviously, the Khmer people had far more serious concerns during much of their recent history; however, Cambodian food has made a strong comeback of late and more and more excellent local-style eateries are appearing in larger towns such as Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. You can even partake in Khmer cookery classes now! Interestingly, when a friend of ours set up the first Cambodian cookery courses in Phnom Penh, most of his customers turned out to be locals; housewives joined up, restaurants sent their chefs and wealthier families enrolled maids who’d all forgotten, or never learnt, how to cook all the local classics. A whole generation of culinary skills and knowledge had been lost during the Khmer Rouge and civil war eras!

When foreign visitors started to trickle back in the late 90s, and the more enterprising local entrepreneurs opened up restaurants to cater to them, there was no tradition of foreign tourism and locals simply often weren’t sure what to offer them. There seemed to be an assumption that these new visitors wouldn’t want to try the traditional, local dishes so the tourist-orientated eateries tended to serve up menus of burgers, pizzas and Thai green curries. It was hard to find decent local food – you either took your chances in a back street cafe or ate Western food in a hotel bar. (And hygiene levels back in the 90s were not always what they should have been.)  Happily, nowadays, excellent and well-prepared local dishes are much easier to find without the need to leave your stomach to the vagaries of backstreet stalls. The fact that more and more tourists clearly did want to try local dishes increased local pride and Khmer cookery slowly but surely emerged from the shadows.

We mentioned street stalls and whilst in most of Southeast Asia, this is where the best and most authentic food is often found hygiene and food conservation levels in Cambodia aren’t always up to what they may be in say in wealthier Thailand or Malaysia so sampling market and street food isn’t as straightforward as is it elsewhere.

As with most of the region, fish, vegetables and rice form the basis of the diet, but Cambodian Food is a fairly eclectic mix. Yes, it can be similar to Thai food with coconut-based curries and basil, lemongrass, lime, coriander and so on, creating recognisable flavours, but the use of chillies is far less generous than in Thailand, so it’s easier on the uninitiated. (You won’t need a litre of cold water on hand when ordering a Khmer papaya salad.) As with neighbouring Thai cuisine, Khmer food also offers a wide range of vegetarian and vegan offerings; however, differentiating it from Thai food are the obvious Vietnamese influences. Classics from the eastern neighbours, such as spring rolls, pho, (noodle soup), beng xao, (Saigon pancakes), etc have been firmly assimilated into the Khmer menu.

The French heritage also surfaces, as in Vietnam and Laos, with the ubiquitous baguettes found in every local market and bus halt as well as in the Khmer classic lok lak – chunks of beef in onion gravy served with rice or even occasionally French fries. Often, when ordering a Khmer curry in a local eatery, you will have the choice of rice or baguette, and with the ‘soupy’ nature of many curries, the latter works well.

There are also regional specialities such as the massaman-style Muslim curries of Kampot or, of course, the celebrated Kep crab in Kampot pepper sauce – a truly superb dish up there with anything you’d find in Thailand.

Naturally, our brief rundown on Cambodian food wouldn’t be complete without the mention of A. prahok or B. fried tarantulas! Prahok or ‘Cambodian cheese’ as the locals jokingly like to call, it is a pungent, fermented fish-based dip. Foreigners eating prahok has locals in stitches but well-prepared, it’s excellent and far more palatable to non-Khmers than they assume it is. The deep-fried spiders and array of fried insects are notorious and the source of many jokes, comical photos and dares but spicy beef or pork in pepper and red ant sauce is actually quite a refined taste and generally goes down well when we’ve ordered it for our tour groups.

Finally, Cambodia’s increasing, and increasingly justified, gastronomic status is enhanced by the wealth of foreign fare available these days in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. The superb French, Italian, Lebanese, Malay, Thai, Indian, Chinese, and Korean restaurants compare in quality and price with any Southeast Asian capital and with the huge range of immigrants and expats, you can find food from right across the world. (A friend of ours has even recently set up a cafe in Siem Reap offering Madagascan specialities!)

The intention of our Cambodia tours is also to provide something of a tour of Cambodian food, so we’ll show you the various influences with a Vietnamese-Khmer restaurant, Thai-Khmer meal and Sino-Khmer eatery as well as some of the unique local dishes. With Khmer restaurants few and far between in most Western countries, few visitors have any conception of what the food will be like when they arrive. We can safely say that pretty much all are pleasantly surprised.