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Sarah says:

Your traveling duo have come up with yet another humorous eating tale for you. Please recall from an earlier post Mai from the Ba Le Well who literally fed us like babies while yelling out “Vietnam Ba Le Well Good!!!” Our tale this time comes to you from Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. On our 2nd night in town we had dinner with Mark & Shirin, the lovely English couple we made friends with during our entrance into Cambodia up the Mekong where our cage-like boat was beseiged by pirate children kind of wanting to steal our bags. Nothing bonds a friendship like crossing the Cambodian border together and we went on to spend a fantastic few days with them, beginning with this dinner.

We were after true Khmer food which I’d heard was amazing so we stumbled into a place right on tourist row that was proudly waving a sign that read, “Good Khmer food.” The place, though, looked like a huge, deserted, florescent-lit cafeteria. I must, however, always remember to look up with asian restaurants becuase the upstairs balcony is always where the ambiance and action are.
Two fatefull things happened during our 1st 5 minutes that, we’ve come to believe, altered the course of what would have otherwise been a normal night of eating out. Firstly, on the way in I spotted a table on which there were maybe 50 small pouches of secret goodness wrapped in banana leaves. I’d been noticing street vendors selling these mysterious things for weeks and I was dying to know what was inside so I stopped our kind host and asked him. He indicated they were for dessert and promised me a try. Then, when we sat down with our menus I told him we wanted the best Khmer food and I asked him what his house specialties were. Fortunately, the menu was a picture menu and he proceeded to engage me in a very animated and dedicated conversation, putting all his food passion into telling me about Khmer food and the dishes we must try. The four of us believe that these two small actions somehow made the host like us.

Throughout the course of the evening we had a team of no less than 4 wait staff attending to us, usually it was closer to 10, somtimes 12. They watched us closely as each dish arrived to make sure we were pleased. They smiled and cheered as we took our first bites. We were kind of seperated from most of the balcony tables by a half wall so we couldn’t see what was going on for everyone else but surely they all got terrible service that night because the entire staff seemed always to be around our table. We feasted on coconut curry, beautifully marinated beef, wonderfully fresh flavors of lemongrass and basil perfectly married together. After dinner, as promised and on the house: plates and plates of the banana leaf pouches arrived, some filled with some kind of coconut custard thing and some filled with a pumpkin custard (I think the ones sold by street vendors are just sticky rice which is my new fave). At the end of the meal, when plates were cleared, one waiter came behind each of us and began giving us massages. At first only 3 of us were being massaged and when the host saw this he sharply clapped his hands, yelled something, pointed to the neglected one and instantly, a 4th masseuse appeared. The massages went on for a bit too long than I think any of us were comfortable with but we didn’t know how to say enough so it just kept going an going……shoulders, arms, neck, temples……with us looking at each other like, “I kind of don’t like this…….do you think they’ll ever stop?” Finally they did and we snapped a picture:

(Picture to follow soon!)

The crowd around our table gathered again when the bill came. A dozen servers and the host completely circled the table and watched us as we reviewed the bill and negotiated the strange new play-currency in our wallets. And as the last one of us layed down the very last note that brought us to our total (which was about $5/person), a group cheer rang out with more laughing and more clapping. We were escorted out of the restaurant by our entourage and, when out on the sidewalk, we all agreed that this was definitely a story for the blog.
Mark & Shirin (their blog) are also traveling for a year- they’re 3 months ahead of us and their tans prove it:

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 5:31 am and is filed under Cambodia, Global Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.