The World is My Oyster

This post is about my food experience on our first day at Siem Reap. For full coverage of the trip, refer to my previous post titled Siem Reap Day 1.

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One of the reasons I’m traveling is to EAT local food muahahaaa! So it’s only fair for me to have separate post for food. It shows respect ;D

Golden Temple Villa

As told on my story for the first day at Siem Reap, we arrived at the hostel in the afternoon. Too hungry to wander around outside, we decided to try the hostel’s restaurant.

Turned out the dishes would be the best I had during my entire stay in Siem Reap.

This set for 2 people cost $5.
Starting from far left clockwise: amok fish, pork, then beef in Khmer sauce, and of course, white rice.

The Amok Fish was HEAVENLY! Amok Fish is one of the most popular Khmer dishes. Amok is actually the style of cooking. So you can choose fish, or other meat or seafood. It’s like Thai curry, but more sweet than spicy. The curry is mixed with beaten eggs. Yuuumm.. *drooling* I tried another Amok fish another time after that, but it’s not as good as the one at my hostel.

In fact, the pork and beef dishes were very good as well, and hardly defeated by any other dishes we took during our entire stay. Here we started to learn that Khmer food consist of HEAPS of VEGGIES and HERBS. But veggies had never tasted that good. They were great!

I have a hobby to taste after food and try to guess what’s in it. And in my opinion I do pretty good :). But I couldn’t guess what was in the dishes even after numerous attempts. A lot of foreign herbs for sure. Khmer dishes in general are somehow close to Vietnamese dishes, with their strong herbs and leaves, and Thai, but not as spicy.

Golden Temple Villa
Steng Thmei, Svaydongkum
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Ph: +855 12 943459
www.goldentemplevilla.com

Snacks

Bought these snacks when we were looking for soap around the town. Prawn and spicy beef cracker. Then 3 instant noodles. Which I brought back to Singapore and have not cooked until now.

Khmer House

At night we were looking for Khmer Kitchen as recommended by Travelfish, but it was closed! We were too late, it was past 10pm. So we went for its neighbor, Khmer House.

A brief look at the menu showed Khmer House was generally more expensive than Khmer Kitchen. Although the place is nicer.

Had curry and beef mushrooms. Liked the curry, it’s like Thai curry. But the mushroom beef was just so-so, almost like Chinese dish. By this time we learned that all the dishes in Siem Reap came in good (read: big) portion.

All these with 2 rice and the banana shake cost around $7. Dishes at Khmer House cost around $3-$4 each. Drink was around $1-$1.5 each.

Not long after, we had a little fight. Ggggrr Ruf Ruf!

UNHAPPY.

Lucky this flower-selling kid came to the rescue! A stem of rose for $1 ;)
(Whatever happened to him with all those bandages?)

And that ended our culinary adventure for day 1.

Khmer Kitchen
The Passage, behind Bar St
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Ph: (063) 964 154. Daily: 10:00-22:00.

~ All prices in USD.

On a side note, there’s a very loud noise coming somewhere around my building, someone speaking with extremely loud speaker. Saying something like “starbucks” a million times, then moved on to “botak” another million times, and move on to another meaningless word. (Obviously he’s speaking in some weird Chinese dialect). I hate it so much I imagine going down and ripping this guy’s heart out with my bare hands. And his eyeballs. He’s lucky he sounds far from my building (I’m SURE HIS VOICE IS GOING AROUND KILOMETERS WIDE!), so I don’t bother to come down myself. I called Eunos Neighbourhood Police Post (Tel: 1800 – 443 9999) and we’ll see if the Singapore police actually do their job. This is my first time ever to call the police because of loud noise, mind you. SO YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW LOUD HE IS. GAH!