Every time I eat samlar (Cambodian soup) – any kind of samlar! – I love it so much, and find it so seductively mysterious, that I go into a kind of starry-eyed research haze and forget how to appropriately speak to Google. I ask Google questions like it’s Ask Jeeves: (“Why is Cambodian soup so good?” “What are the ingredients of samlar machu?” etc).
And Google, tolerant as usually it is of Ask-Jeeves-phrased questions, gives me a mere smattering! Nobody (in the English speaking world) seems to know much about Cambodian soup. I mean, Google actually tried to auto fill “Why is Cambodian soup so…” with the words “poor”, “corrupt”, and “low”. I mean, really? People are asking why their soup is corrupt, but I have to dig deep into the bowels of the internet to find out why samlar machu, despite having exactly the description of tom yum on most menus, is so much more delicious to me than tom yum? Or why samlar korko hasn’t supplanted chili as the stew-at-barbecues of choice, with its sweet-potato-esque kabocha, thick meaty eggplant slices, and fat-lined pork ribs?
Cambodian soups – at least any one of them individually, but certainly all as a group – should have at least the following of pho. At least. There should be samlar-spiced sandwich trucks plying DTLA. (There’s wordplay in there somewhere.) Kabocha and toasted rice powder should be showing up as a topping on tacos. Blanched banana blossoms and lemongrass would make a pretty good vegetarian burrito filling, come to think of it.
What shocks me almost as much as the fact that the above isn’t real life is the fact that I never wrote about any of the soups I ate in Cambodia, while I was actually in Cambodia. I remember feeling smiled upon by the gods of culinary luck every time I sat down at some blue-tarped roadside restaurant, pointed at an indecipherable jumble of Khmer script, and was served some wondrous, vegetable-filled mystery broth full of fish so fresh from the river it was practically sweet, but I never wrote about it! This was probably because I had no idea what I was tasting, and could not, therefore, put words to experiences. How was I supposed to describe bowlfuls of total unfamiliarity? Especially when the photos were so uninspiring, sometimes containing my finger and always not doing the taste justice?
Long Beach, luckily, is stuffed much fuller than almost any other American city with Cambodian restaurants. In fact, it contains the largest Cambodian community outside of Cambodia. I touched on some of these restaurants in this entry, but only briefly skirted the topic of soup, paying homage to a cloudy tamarind-leaf fish soup at Crystal Thai-Cambodian Restaurant. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with the samlar korko (kabocha/pork rib/eggplant/roasted rice) at the same place, and the samlar machu (sour soup with ginger and lemongrass) and the trey andaing (“farmer’s” catfish/banana blossom soup) at Monorom Cambodian Restaurant, a few blocks over and one block higher.
I ordered the trey andaing alone, and the waitress warned me: “You will need to take some home!” (Yeah yeah, I’m used to that, I’ve been to Korea-the-country and Korea-the-town-in-LA, where it is assumed that everyone is a championship eater and has banchan-pouches in the sides of their stomachs.) It came out perched atop a solitary but blistering flame, the stream of steam from the fire making me sweat profusely, adding to the authenticity of it all, just like being in Cambodia. The banana flower, blanched pure white, nothing like its oniony Vietnamese cousins that curl in bun bo hue, was soft, rather like bamboo, and sliced like noodles. Shavings of lemongrass drifted along like bonito flakes, occasionally catching on some circles of ginger that, when accidentally bitten, would flood and reset my tastebuds.
And the fish in it… now, I like catfish, but it tends to taste, unmistakably, like catfish: kind of a dirty, bottomfeedery, pungent, I-eat-mud-for-breakfast kind of thing. This fish, purportedly catfish, tasted nothing like that. It tasted clean, for all the world like it had just been fished out of the Mekong, even though that would have been impossible from 7000 miles away. What it tasted like, in actuality, was snakehead: this pure, clean, cloudlike white flavor and texture.
This flavor was perhaps the only flavor in the whole soup that could have been called mild. The rest of it was stinky and bold. The shrimp were skin-on, tiny, and sweet, but strong. There was a whole sac of fish roe just hanging out and falling apart all over everything. Prahok, the omnipresent Cambodian fermented mudfish that makes even Vietnamese purple shrimp paste taste tame in comparison, provided the whole bowl with an undercurrent of funkiness that mingled with the scent of the flame under the soup (Prahok, in all honesty, is probably the answer to the question I pose above about why Cambodian soup isn’t more popular. The first time I came to this restaurant, roughly two years earlier, my dining companion whispered from behind his cupped hand that my lunch smelled ‘like gorilla farts’. I guess I like gorilla farts!)
I took a larger group back two weeks later for what I hoped would be a soup crawl, and we did get try two new soups: Monorom’s version of samlar korko and the samlar machu. The machu was ordered despite my protestations – I can’t stomach tom yum, which, like I mentioned above, machu is a cousin to – but the whole table loved it, and so, astonishingly, did I. The same sweet, globe-traveling fish floated around in the clear yet bitingly astringent ginger/lemongrass/citrus broth. It was coated, blanketlike, in tons of morning glory leaves. As though the tom yum aversion weren’t enough to try and turn me off of this soup, I also am not crazy about morning glory leaves, because one time I had a plate of them in Chengdu that were so heavily coated with Sichuan peppercorn that I couldn’t feel my throat for hours and thought I was dying. But even with that working against it, I still loved this soup. How could I not? It was more refreshing than lemonade.
The samlar korko was less well-received by the table, and even I had to admit that Crystal Thai-Cambodian does it better. But there’s something I love about the gritty texture of the toasted rice powder, coating everything like a dry spice rub, and how the kabocha tastes like a lighter version of pumpkin. There’s also something charmingly down-to-earth about how it’s impossible to eat the ribs without plucking them out of your spoon by hand and gnawing at them like you’re sitting around a fire 10000 years ago. I do wish they weren’t overcook them, though. (Something I notice about Cambodian food – both here in the States and in Cambodia – is that they tend to cook their fish to flaky, cloudlike perfection, but turn their meat into a woody, tough [albeit wonderfully spiced and fat-coated] mess. Monorom’s beef lok lak is another example of that. Oh well. Nobody’s perfect.
While I still have a long way to go working my way down menus of mystery samlar, I would love it if anyone shared with me a site that has good recipes. There’s an adorable youtube channel that consists entirely of videos of someone’s Grandma cooking delicious-looking dishes, but then suddenly – in every recipe – “chicken flavor soup base mix”! I don’t mind it if I don’t know it (more like I CAN’T mind) but I’m not going to use it myself. I’d feel like I was cheating.
Showing posts with label Khmer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Khmer. Show all posts
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Welcome To The Neighborhood
So, I moved to Long Beach.
That’s right, I voluntarily left the location where the fragrant embraces of Koreatown, Boyle Heights, Glendale, and Northeast L.A. converge. I gave up the ability to indulge in blue corn quesadillas on my way back from a jaunt to the Vietnamese market to pick up my weekly durian sticky rice. To take the bus to the caviar specialty store and stop for searingly hot crispy pork skins on the way home. To skirt downtown and drown happily in bowlfuls of Sichuan fish and intestine stew.
But Long Beach has its own secrets; while slow to show themselves, they are here.
For one thing, there is the farmers market.
Despite the fact that it’s literally on my block, it is well-hidden: aurally by skate-park shouts, and visually by a big ugly building whose purpose I have not yet discovered. You round a corner and there it is. You pick your way through mazes of beckoning shouts: wheatgrass! Natural dog cookies! Rustic soap! House-perfuming crystalline stones! These are the siren songs you must successfully resist to be allowed into the prepared food area.
At most farmers markets, this section is sparse. Much of it is usually dedicated to packaged pre-made food, not meals you might be able to eat on-site. At other markets, I’ve been sent home with stacked containers of green, red, black, and brown mole. I’ve staggered to my car with enough hummus to feed myself, exclusively on hummus, for 2 months. In Echo Park in particular, there was even organic banchan, which I only side-eyed after seeing the prices. But in terms of having dinner, I had only been to markets where you still have to go home and prepare it.
The Bixby Park Farmers Market, in comparison, is like a food truck festival without the hipness. Pupusa and tamale tents crowd each other and tout their competing horchatas, while, somehow, an Indian buffet manages to conform to the demands of the outdoors. A Korean sandwich tent sends smells out to mingle with the fish taco place across the way, while a wrap joint borrows from its surroundings by offering a chicken tikka masala wrap in the same breath as a salmon ‘n’ spinach rice plate. A bare-boned chicken wing tent elbows its pizza-selling neighbor’s wood-burning oven, and a lobster roll stand attempts to roll over the smoky aroma with the inviting smell of melted butter.
I have eaten at many, but not all, of these tents. The “problem” (read: not a problem) is, the tamale and pupusa tents reign so far supreme that I have trouble venturing anywhere else.
That pupusa tent, a cell of Wilmington’s Restaurante Estela, always has a group of salivating market-goers crowded around it, because the couple who run it take forever to make the pupusas (forever in market-time: at least 10 minutes). It isn’t consistent, as sometimes the cheese is sour or the bottoms are burnt, but when the pupusas are good, they’re as good as hot, melty, bubbling masa filled with savory meats, cheeses, and veggies are going to get. Their slaw topping is pink, vinegary, and begging for the bright red hot sauce that comes with it. My favorite is the revuelta, a gooey mess of pork, beans and cheese.
Sometimes, I’m not in the mood for pupusas, but I’ll still stop by to grab a mystery-fruit-filled ‘tropical punch’ – a passion-fruit heavy drink full of chopped fruit – or a Salvadorian horchata, which tastes like a cross between raw almond milk and the smell of brazil nuts. I’m there so often that the proprietor knows me by a name which he thinks is mine, but is not.
The tamale tent, perhaps too simply (but accurately) named ‘Me Gusta‘ (and headquartered in Pacoima), has the airiest, moistest masa I’ve ever tasted in my life, and the masa is flavored differently depending on its fillings. I know this sounds like a ‘duh’ statement, but to infuse the whole tamale, masa and all, with the flavor of the filling is quite unusual. Usually masa tastes like masa, and that’s that, but here, you know whether you’re biting into the rich, mole-like beef with red sauce or the seed-peppered kick of pork with green sauce before you even get to the meat. I should also mention that they tout their lardless preparation. When I first heard this, I scoffed, because everyone knows lard is what makes tamales tasty. I guess they’ve found another way, and I don’t expect them to let this secret out anytime soon.
If you can pull yourself away from these two tents (I can’t), there’s San Pedro’s fish tacos (straightforward execution, generous with the toppings, could stand to cook their fish less), pizza sticks (I am unqualified to comment due to my anti-pizza orientation) hot pineapple wings (tender, but marred by the use of canned pineapple), a vegan Mexican place (lost me as soon as they sold me a vegan cacao drink for $5 that tasted like watered down Snack Pack chocolate pudding), a creperie (does a pretty solid pine nut pesto spinach crepe), and a falafel stand (falafel so dry it that it instantly sucks all the moisture out of your mouth and throat).
Stands pop up and disappear weekly, but the two standouts are solid and dependable. Find them by the bandstand – as soon as the music is too loud to hear yourself think, you are in the right place.
—
Long Beach is home to Cambodia Town. Before I lived here, this is one of the only reasons I ever travelled down (or up) here. It’s a blurred-bordered area, centering on Anaheim between Alamitos and Junipero, but my favorite restaurant is on 10th Street, across from a near-criminally cheap laundromat, and there’s a noodle joint on 17th Street I regularly fill myself up on for $4, so you can’t discover Cambodia Town’s secrets by walking on the main drag. Much like Phnom Penh itself, you have to wind around its back streets, spending the whole day sauntering. And also like Phnom Penh, the streets are neatly numbered, making it impossible to get lost.
This 10th street restaurant, Crystal Thai-Cambodian Cuisine, has a menu way more confusing than the neighborhood in which it sits, mainly because it doesn’t really reflect what the restaurant is offering that day. In 2011, I was able to nibble around the edges of some delicious vertebrae-looking hunks of spiny eel, but in 2015, when I ask for the eel, my waiter simply laughs and says nobody ever ordered it, so it’s gone. The appetizer spring rolls – called ‘appetizers’ even though they’re tree-trunk sized – are similarly ephemeral, blinking into and out of existence based on the whims of the kitchen. Soups come out with whatever vegetables happen to be around, no matter what the menu descriptions say, and a lot of different curries get written down on the waitress’ pad as simply ‘panang’. There’s no brown rice, probably because who eats brown rice in Southeast Asia?
Of course, the only restaurants that can get away with putting up this many obstacles are restaurants whose food is good enough to be worth it, and here Crystal is no exception. Anything lemongrassy is dry-rubbed with a dusky sauce that, upon closer inspection, looks full of tiny, delicious little tree branches. My favorite is the chha kroeung, with either frog or fish. The frog – its whole body chopped roughly, not just its legs, can be a little overcooked, but I forgive it for the simple joy of popping its half-chicken, half-fish textured flesh off the smooth bones, and for the tiny-tree-branch-coated long beans everywhere. Eaten alone, it’s uncomfortably spicy, but with rice, you only cry a little.
One of the many things the waitress writes down as ‘panang’ is the special fish curry, which has meaty, thick-cut steaks of bony fish marinating in a deep yellow, creamy, unexpectedly fiery sauce. Fillet these fish with your chopsticks before beginning to eat, or you’ll spend the meal spitting out bones, and here, unlike in most of Southeast Asia, it is not polite to simply spit them into a pile on the floor next to you. There is also the tamarind leaves soup, which has hunks of floating fish fat, clouds of soft, silky leaves and stalks, and salty explosions of fermented shrimp, plus, of course, whatever vegetables the chefs feels like throwing in there. In fact, any soup you order will be epic, a veritable bucket of mystery leaves, hunks of bone-in, fat-attached meat, and three different kinds of eggplants.
Enjoy your dinner with their complementary tea, but a warning: it is much, MUCH more caffeinated than it looks or tastes. I’ve spent more than one night wide awake, thinking I’m having a panic attack, but really I’ve just eaten dinner at Crystal and drunk too many pots of tea.
While it’s never difficult to get a seat at Crystal, especially at night, Phnom Penh Noodle Shack at Cherry and 17th keeps the stubborn hours of 6AM to 3PM, and so gets absolutely swamped around lunchtime (I’ve never been there at opening time to see if anyone’s jonesing hard for noodle bowls at the crack of dawn). They have but one bench, and the rest of the sidewalk is a solid mass of salivating people.
Once you get in, you’ll want just one thing: the namesake #1: Phnom Penh Noodle. I won’t restrict you too much in my recommendation, though: you get to choose your noodle type (rice, egg, teardrop, ‘Mama’), and whether you want it ‘wet’ (broth-in) or ‘dry’ (broth-on-side). For my tastes, I like it dry and with teardrop noodles, though they’ll usually try and convince me that teardrop noodles need to soak in broth. Nonsense, I say (from my seat of cultural misunderstanding)! Their chewy texture when dry reminds me of those wheaty, robust Western Chinese noodles that usually show up accompanied by mutton. Here, in Phnom Penh style, they come with meat from all parts of the pig, including the liver and stomach, plus shrimp, plus a whole bunch of herbs. Despite the fact that the organ meat/herb combo leaves the soup tasting very strong already, the waiter might come around and pointedly remind you that, you know, there’s SAUCES on the table for you to use, hint hint.
This bowl of intense pleasure and the tenderest stomach you’ll ever taste runs $4 for a kids size, which is too large for me to finish. Also, they have no qualms serving a 30 year old a kids size bowl of noodles.
If you have time for only two restaurants when exploring Cambodia Town, I have no second thoughts in recommending these two; however, I have some honorable mentions to, well, mention:
– Amok Trey at Siem Reap: this fish-curry-served-in-a-coconut dish would be emblematic of the tropics if Cambodia was the sort of place we thought of when we thought of the tropics. It’s incredibly nuanced, with fish soft as butter and a cool greenish foam of spices bursting from the lip of the fresh coconut.
– Coconut shake at Cyclo Noodles: layers and layers of coconut and cream, as well as a guaranteed laxative, but totally worth it.
– Banh mi at Baguette Paris: OK, I’m not if this shop is technically Cambodian, because everything is written in Vietnamese, and the owner speaks a million languages, but it’s smack in the middle of Cambodia Town and its paté reeks of anchovies, in a good way.
That’s right, I voluntarily left the location where the fragrant embraces of Koreatown, Boyle Heights, Glendale, and Northeast L.A. converge. I gave up the ability to indulge in blue corn quesadillas on my way back from a jaunt to the Vietnamese market to pick up my weekly durian sticky rice. To take the bus to the caviar specialty store and stop for searingly hot crispy pork skins on the way home. To skirt downtown and drown happily in bowlfuls of Sichuan fish and intestine stew.
But Long Beach has its own secrets; while slow to show themselves, they are here.
For one thing, there is the farmers market.
Despite the fact that it’s literally on my block, it is well-hidden: aurally by skate-park shouts, and visually by a big ugly building whose purpose I have not yet discovered. You round a corner and there it is. You pick your way through mazes of beckoning shouts: wheatgrass! Natural dog cookies! Rustic soap! House-perfuming crystalline stones! These are the siren songs you must successfully resist to be allowed into the prepared food area.
At most farmers markets, this section is sparse. Much of it is usually dedicated to packaged pre-made food, not meals you might be able to eat on-site. At other markets, I’ve been sent home with stacked containers of green, red, black, and brown mole. I’ve staggered to my car with enough hummus to feed myself, exclusively on hummus, for 2 months. In Echo Park in particular, there was even organic banchan, which I only side-eyed after seeing the prices. But in terms of having dinner, I had only been to markets where you still have to go home and prepare it.
The Bixby Park Farmers Market, in comparison, is like a food truck festival without the hipness. Pupusa and tamale tents crowd each other and tout their competing horchatas, while, somehow, an Indian buffet manages to conform to the demands of the outdoors. A Korean sandwich tent sends smells out to mingle with the fish taco place across the way, while a wrap joint borrows from its surroundings by offering a chicken tikka masala wrap in the same breath as a salmon ‘n’ spinach rice plate. A bare-boned chicken wing tent elbows its pizza-selling neighbor’s wood-burning oven, and a lobster roll stand attempts to roll over the smoky aroma with the inviting smell of melted butter.
I have eaten at many, but not all, of these tents. The “problem” (read: not a problem) is, the tamale and pupusa tents reign so far supreme that I have trouble venturing anywhere else.
That pupusa tent, a cell of Wilmington’s Restaurante Estela, always has a group of salivating market-goers crowded around it, because the couple who run it take forever to make the pupusas (forever in market-time: at least 10 minutes). It isn’t consistent, as sometimes the cheese is sour or the bottoms are burnt, but when the pupusas are good, they’re as good as hot, melty, bubbling masa filled with savory meats, cheeses, and veggies are going to get. Their slaw topping is pink, vinegary, and begging for the bright red hot sauce that comes with it. My favorite is the revuelta, a gooey mess of pork, beans and cheese.
Sometimes, I’m not in the mood for pupusas, but I’ll still stop by to grab a mystery-fruit-filled ‘tropical punch’ – a passion-fruit heavy drink full of chopped fruit – or a Salvadorian horchata, which tastes like a cross between raw almond milk and the smell of brazil nuts. I’m there so often that the proprietor knows me by a name which he thinks is mine, but is not.
The tamale tent, perhaps too simply (but accurately) named ‘Me Gusta‘ (and headquartered in Pacoima), has the airiest, moistest masa I’ve ever tasted in my life, and the masa is flavored differently depending on its fillings. I know this sounds like a ‘duh’ statement, but to infuse the whole tamale, masa and all, with the flavor of the filling is quite unusual. Usually masa tastes like masa, and that’s that, but here, you know whether you’re biting into the rich, mole-like beef with red sauce or the seed-peppered kick of pork with green sauce before you even get to the meat. I should also mention that they tout their lardless preparation. When I first heard this, I scoffed, because everyone knows lard is what makes tamales tasty. I guess they’ve found another way, and I don’t expect them to let this secret out anytime soon.
If you can pull yourself away from these two tents (I can’t), there’s San Pedro’s fish tacos (straightforward execution, generous with the toppings, could stand to cook their fish less), pizza sticks (I am unqualified to comment due to my anti-pizza orientation) hot pineapple wings (tender, but marred by the use of canned pineapple), a vegan Mexican place (lost me as soon as they sold me a vegan cacao drink for $5 that tasted like watered down Snack Pack chocolate pudding), a creperie (does a pretty solid pine nut pesto spinach crepe), and a falafel stand (falafel so dry it that it instantly sucks all the moisture out of your mouth and throat).
Stands pop up and disappear weekly, but the two standouts are solid and dependable. Find them by the bandstand – as soon as the music is too loud to hear yourself think, you are in the right place.
—
Long Beach is home to Cambodia Town. Before I lived here, this is one of the only reasons I ever travelled down (or up) here. It’s a blurred-bordered area, centering on Anaheim between Alamitos and Junipero, but my favorite restaurant is on 10th Street, across from a near-criminally cheap laundromat, and there’s a noodle joint on 17th Street I regularly fill myself up on for $4, so you can’t discover Cambodia Town’s secrets by walking on the main drag. Much like Phnom Penh itself, you have to wind around its back streets, spending the whole day sauntering. And also like Phnom Penh, the streets are neatly numbered, making it impossible to get lost.
This 10th street restaurant, Crystal Thai-Cambodian Cuisine, has a menu way more confusing than the neighborhood in which it sits, mainly because it doesn’t really reflect what the restaurant is offering that day. In 2011, I was able to nibble around the edges of some delicious vertebrae-looking hunks of spiny eel, but in 2015, when I ask for the eel, my waiter simply laughs and says nobody ever ordered it, so it’s gone. The appetizer spring rolls – called ‘appetizers’ even though they’re tree-trunk sized – are similarly ephemeral, blinking into and out of existence based on the whims of the kitchen. Soups come out with whatever vegetables happen to be around, no matter what the menu descriptions say, and a lot of different curries get written down on the waitress’ pad as simply ‘panang’. There’s no brown rice, probably because who eats brown rice in Southeast Asia?
Of course, the only restaurants that can get away with putting up this many obstacles are restaurants whose food is good enough to be worth it, and here Crystal is no exception. Anything lemongrassy is dry-rubbed with a dusky sauce that, upon closer inspection, looks full of tiny, delicious little tree branches. My favorite is the chha kroeung, with either frog or fish. The frog – its whole body chopped roughly, not just its legs, can be a little overcooked, but I forgive it for the simple joy of popping its half-chicken, half-fish textured flesh off the smooth bones, and for the tiny-tree-branch-coated long beans everywhere. Eaten alone, it’s uncomfortably spicy, but with rice, you only cry a little.
One of the many things the waitress writes down as ‘panang’ is the special fish curry, which has meaty, thick-cut steaks of bony fish marinating in a deep yellow, creamy, unexpectedly fiery sauce. Fillet these fish with your chopsticks before beginning to eat, or you’ll spend the meal spitting out bones, and here, unlike in most of Southeast Asia, it is not polite to simply spit them into a pile on the floor next to you. There is also the tamarind leaves soup, which has hunks of floating fish fat, clouds of soft, silky leaves and stalks, and salty explosions of fermented shrimp, plus, of course, whatever vegetables the chefs feels like throwing in there. In fact, any soup you order will be epic, a veritable bucket of mystery leaves, hunks of bone-in, fat-attached meat, and three different kinds of eggplants.
Enjoy your dinner with their complementary tea, but a warning: it is much, MUCH more caffeinated than it looks or tastes. I’ve spent more than one night wide awake, thinking I’m having a panic attack, but really I’ve just eaten dinner at Crystal and drunk too many pots of tea.
While it’s never difficult to get a seat at Crystal, especially at night, Phnom Penh Noodle Shack at Cherry and 17th keeps the stubborn hours of 6AM to 3PM, and so gets absolutely swamped around lunchtime (I’ve never been there at opening time to see if anyone’s jonesing hard for noodle bowls at the crack of dawn). They have but one bench, and the rest of the sidewalk is a solid mass of salivating people.
Once you get in, you’ll want just one thing: the namesake #1: Phnom Penh Noodle. I won’t restrict you too much in my recommendation, though: you get to choose your noodle type (rice, egg, teardrop, ‘Mama’), and whether you want it ‘wet’ (broth-in) or ‘dry’ (broth-on-side). For my tastes, I like it dry and with teardrop noodles, though they’ll usually try and convince me that teardrop noodles need to soak in broth. Nonsense, I say (from my seat of cultural misunderstanding)! Their chewy texture when dry reminds me of those wheaty, robust Western Chinese noodles that usually show up accompanied by mutton. Here, in Phnom Penh style, they come with meat from all parts of the pig, including the liver and stomach, plus shrimp, plus a whole bunch of herbs. Despite the fact that the organ meat/herb combo leaves the soup tasting very strong already, the waiter might come around and pointedly remind you that, you know, there’s SAUCES on the table for you to use, hint hint.
This bowl of intense pleasure and the tenderest stomach you’ll ever taste runs $4 for a kids size, which is too large for me to finish. Also, they have no qualms serving a 30 year old a kids size bowl of noodles.
If you have time for only two restaurants when exploring Cambodia Town, I have no second thoughts in recommending these two; however, I have some honorable mentions to, well, mention:
– Amok Trey at Siem Reap: this fish-curry-served-in-a-coconut dish would be emblematic of the tropics if Cambodia was the sort of place we thought of when we thought of the tropics. It’s incredibly nuanced, with fish soft as butter and a cool greenish foam of spices bursting from the lip of the fresh coconut.
– Coconut shake at Cyclo Noodles: layers and layers of coconut and cream, as well as a guaranteed laxative, but totally worth it.
– Banh mi at Baguette Paris: OK, I’m not if this shop is technically Cambodian, because everything is written in Vietnamese, and the owner speaks a million languages, but it’s smack in the middle of Cambodia Town and its paté reeks of anchovies, in a good way.
Thursday, November 7, 2013
No Expectations II: Bún nước kèn at Hà Tiên Quán
"Oh, this dish? Only you and the family eat it," I think the owner of Hà Tiên Quán is saying to me. What does he mean? Am I the first person ever to order it? Impossible... but intriguing.
"It's a Cambodian dish, like a Cambodian fish stew," he says. "Ground fish. Coconut. We serve it with green papaya. You know, Hà Tiên is on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. I was born in Cambodia."
"Really?" I've forgotten to wonder whether or not I'm really the first customer to eat his Cambodian fish stew. Now I want to ask him what this strange ingredient in my Khmer cookbook is. When asked, Google returns only passages of the text of the very same cookbook. But he's already started on his family history.
From China to Cambodia to Vietnam to the U.S., this man has plucked languages and culinary traditions up from the ground wherever he's been. His restaurant is a cacophony of tongues, changing in an instant depending on who's speaking or who's listening. "I feel Chinese in my blood, but I like Vietnamese food," he says a little sheepishly laughing.
"Me too!" I say with feeling, trying to convey how abnormally much this is true. I mean, not that I feel Chinese in my blood. I feel Vietnamese in my blood sometimes. Like all of it is my comfort food. Like I grew up eating it, even though in reality I first had it when I was twenty-three.
The mystery Khmer dish, the bún nước kèn, comes out of the kitchen (perhaps for the first time) darkly steaming and wafting the scent of something akin to Thai fish cakes. Alongside it is a boat-shaped plate of greenish-yellow papaya, jalapeños, cucumbers, and rau răm. This in addition, of course, to the regular old giant plate of herbs that accompanies everything else - the basil, the mint, the fish-mint, the kitchen sink.
I can't relate it to any familiar dish, really, without seeming uncomplimentary, though this isn't at all my intent. The texture is peculiar, like if you dissolved sausage in milk. Lumpy oatmeal? No no, ground beef in pasta sauce! But strands of noodles come poking through and scatter the lumps, which, despite their soaked sausage visage, taste coconutty and vibrant. The fish flavor is somehow both fresh and a little smoky, giving off the taste impression of jerky while maintaining moistness. I dump all the veggies in and quickly lose track of what is a noodle, what is a papaya spear, and what is a bean sprout, leaving the surprise for my teeth to figure out.
It should probably go without saying how delicious it is, how much I savor it, returning to Asia behind my eyelids as I chew.
"Can you eat spicy food?" the owner says, returning to me just as I'm starting to lose focus. "Cambodians do it like this: chew on a pepper between bites. Spoon. Bite on pepper. Spoon. Bite on pepper." And he sets down a plate of little red bird peppers in front of me.
"It's a Cambodian dish, like a Cambodian fish stew," he says. "Ground fish. Coconut. We serve it with green papaya. You know, Hà Tiên is on the border between Vietnam and Cambodia. I was born in Cambodia."
"Really?" I've forgotten to wonder whether or not I'm really the first customer to eat his Cambodian fish stew. Now I want to ask him what this strange ingredient in my Khmer cookbook is. When asked, Google returns only passages of the text of the very same cookbook. But he's already started on his family history.
From China to Cambodia to Vietnam to the U.S., this man has plucked languages and culinary traditions up from the ground wherever he's been. His restaurant is a cacophony of tongues, changing in an instant depending on who's speaking or who's listening. "I feel Chinese in my blood, but I like Vietnamese food," he says a little sheepishly laughing.
"Me too!" I say with feeling, trying to convey how abnormally much this is true. I mean, not that I feel Chinese in my blood. I feel Vietnamese in my blood sometimes. Like all of it is my comfort food. Like I grew up eating it, even though in reality I first had it when I was twenty-three.
The mystery Khmer dish, the bún nước kèn, comes out of the kitchen (perhaps for the first time) darkly steaming and wafting the scent of something akin to Thai fish cakes. Alongside it is a boat-shaped plate of greenish-yellow papaya, jalapeños, cucumbers, and rau răm. This in addition, of course, to the regular old giant plate of herbs that accompanies everything else - the basil, the mint, the fish-mint, the kitchen sink.
I can't relate it to any familiar dish, really, without seeming uncomplimentary, though this isn't at all my intent. The texture is peculiar, like if you dissolved sausage in milk. Lumpy oatmeal? No no, ground beef in pasta sauce! But strands of noodles come poking through and scatter the lumps, which, despite their soaked sausage visage, taste coconutty and vibrant. The fish flavor is somehow both fresh and a little smoky, giving off the taste impression of jerky while maintaining moistness. I dump all the veggies in and quickly lose track of what is a noodle, what is a papaya spear, and what is a bean sprout, leaving the surprise for my teeth to figure out.
It should probably go without saying how delicious it is, how much I savor it, returning to Asia behind my eyelids as I chew.
"Can you eat spicy food?" the owner says, returning to me just as I'm starting to lose focus. "Cambodians do it like this: chew on a pepper between bites. Spoon. Bite on pepper. Spoon. Bite on pepper." And he sets down a plate of little red bird peppers in front of me.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Snacking across Asia, part III: Vietnam and Cambodia
(... continued from Part II.)
Oftentimes in Vietnam, the lines were blurred on what was a meal and what was a snack. Fully 90% of my meals took place planted on an ankle-high stool in a street somewhere, cost less than $2, and took only a few minutes out of my day while I slurped up the fist-size chunk of noodles or wrapped odds and ends in lettuce, basil, and mint leaves. Were these meals or snacks? Sometimes I ate five of them a day, but was that because of their diminutive size or my Vietnamese food gluttony?
Another peculiarity of Vietnam was that its best snacks were often technically drinks. On every heat-drenched corner was a maze of stands selling rau má (pennywort juice), nước mía (sugarcane juice), nước ép (fruit juice) and sinh tố (fruit shakes). The sinh tố was where things could get wild, making use of fruits as diverse as durian and jackfruit, mango, tomato, pineapple, squash, kumquat, soursop, avocado and sapodilla (a fruit I knew only as the Vietnamese 'sapoche' until this very second, when I looked up the English translation).
Keeping this in mind,
1. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Sinh tố
Making sinh tố is far from an exact science, and the proportions vary slightly by stand, but the recipe for a Vietnamese smoothie is, roughly, as follows:
Scoop edible portion of fruit into blender
Grab can of condensed milk; glop a ton of it into the blender on top of the fruit
Grab sugar jug and make it snow on top of the fruit and milk
Add ice
Blend
Even though I watched this process at least 50 times over my four weeks in Vietnam, and fully expected every time that my smoothie should taste like sugar and milk, it magically never did. It always tasted like someone liquefied and concentrated my favorite fruit and put it directly on my tongue. Durian shakes were appropriately stinky and retained a nice bit of custardy texture, while the jackfruit versions thankfully cut out their hint of slime. Avocado shakes made my American palate forget that avocados were meant for guacamole and savory dishes, not sweet ones (I told a smoothie-hawker once that Americans ate avocado only with salty things and she laughed so hard she knocked over a whole pineapple she was about to slice). I don't like sapodilla much, so it was entirely appropriate for me to think that the shake version tasted like rotten avocados.
Sinh tố was, if not the centerpiece of many photos, at least in the background, fueling the photographer.
2. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: "Bánh Mì"
Bánh mì (sandwich) shops are almost as omnipresent as sinh tố stands, but I was surprised to see them pop up from time to time in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian version, name unknown (as Khmer script is all loops to me) was half the size, coated with fiery red sauce and a heavy, pudding-like paté that tasted almost fermented, and had crunchy pork skins scattered across the top instead of head cheese.
3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: banana-filled rice
This five-cent snack came from a griddle full of its twins run by an old lady sitting across from the Chinese Embassy. Unadulterated, nothing but a grill-blackened pad of rice surrounding a lava-hot, sticky flow of ripe banana. I'm surprised the rest of the tropics haven't caught on!
4. Everywhere: Quail eggs
They come hardboiled; they come as balut. They come wrapped up pretty in little quail-egg-sized bags, tied with a ribbon. A ribbon! Inside the ten-egg packet is an even smaller packet of chili-spiced salt that is stapled closed. Their vendors cycle through the street and wend their way between tables at seafood, barbecue, and hotpot restaurants. I'd stop them on the sidewalk on my way home, hand them the equivalent of 25 cents, and go home with a bag of eggs to painstakingly peel and eat sprawled out on my hotel bed.
5. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Bánh chuối
Down the street from our last hotel was a tiny grocery which we never entered. We never entered it because its bakery was outside, and it had perfect round spheres of blackened banana pastry all ready for us to order from the sidewalk. The proprietor would slice a big fat triangle of jiggling cake-pudding hybrid into a plastic bag at night, and it would warm to breakfast temperature in the hot room by morning.
Oftentimes in Vietnam, the lines were blurred on what was a meal and what was a snack. Fully 90% of my meals took place planted on an ankle-high stool in a street somewhere, cost less than $2, and took only a few minutes out of my day while I slurped up the fist-size chunk of noodles or wrapped odds and ends in lettuce, basil, and mint leaves. Were these meals or snacks? Sometimes I ate five of them a day, but was that because of their diminutive size or my Vietnamese food gluttony?
Another peculiarity of Vietnam was that its best snacks were often technically drinks. On every heat-drenched corner was a maze of stands selling rau má (pennywort juice), nước mía (sugarcane juice), nước ép (fruit juice) and sinh tố (fruit shakes). The sinh tố was where things could get wild, making use of fruits as diverse as durian and jackfruit, mango, tomato, pineapple, squash, kumquat, soursop, avocado and sapodilla (a fruit I knew only as the Vietnamese 'sapoche' until this very second, when I looked up the English translation).
Keeping this in mind,
1. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Sinh tố
Making sinh tố is far from an exact science, and the proportions vary slightly by stand, but the recipe for a Vietnamese smoothie is, roughly, as follows:
Scoop edible portion of fruit into blender
Grab can of condensed milk; glop a ton of it into the blender on top of the fruit
Grab sugar jug and make it snow on top of the fruit and milk
Add ice
Blend
Even though I watched this process at least 50 times over my four weeks in Vietnam, and fully expected every time that my smoothie should taste like sugar and milk, it magically never did. It always tasted like someone liquefied and concentrated my favorite fruit and put it directly on my tongue. Durian shakes were appropriately stinky and retained a nice bit of custardy texture, while the jackfruit versions thankfully cut out their hint of slime. Avocado shakes made my American palate forget that avocados were meant for guacamole and savory dishes, not sweet ones (I told a smoothie-hawker once that Americans ate avocado only with salty things and she laughed so hard she knocked over a whole pineapple she was about to slice). I don't like sapodilla much, so it was entirely appropriate for me to think that the shake version tasted like rotten avocados.
Sinh tố was, if not the centerpiece of many photos, at least in the background, fueling the photographer.
 |
| Sinh tố in the southeast of the city |
 |
| Sinh tố at Chợ Lớn market |
 |
| Sitting behind a sinh tố stand in District 10 |
 |
| Sinh tố in Phnom Penh |
 |
| Where the Phnom Penh sinh tố came from |
Bánh mì (sandwich) shops are almost as omnipresent as sinh tố stands, but I was surprised to see them pop up from time to time in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian version, name unknown (as Khmer script is all loops to me) was half the size, coated with fiery red sauce and a heavy, pudding-like paté that tasted almost fermented, and had crunchy pork skins scattered across the top instead of head cheese.
3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: banana-filled rice
This five-cent snack came from a griddle full of its twins run by an old lady sitting across from the Chinese Embassy. Unadulterated, nothing but a grill-blackened pad of rice surrounding a lava-hot, sticky flow of ripe banana. I'm surprised the rest of the tropics haven't caught on!
4. Everywhere: Quail eggs
They come hardboiled; they come as balut. They come wrapped up pretty in little quail-egg-sized bags, tied with a ribbon. A ribbon! Inside the ten-egg packet is an even smaller packet of chili-spiced salt that is stapled closed. Their vendors cycle through the street and wend their way between tables at seafood, barbecue, and hotpot restaurants. I'd stop them on the sidewalk on my way home, hand them the equivalent of 25 cents, and go home with a bag of eggs to painstakingly peel and eat sprawled out on my hotel bed.
5. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Bánh chuối
Down the street from our last hotel was a tiny grocery which we never entered. We never entered it because its bakery was outside, and it had perfect round spheres of blackened banana pastry all ready for us to order from the sidewalk. The proprietor would slice a big fat triangle of jiggling cake-pudding hybrid into a plastic bag at night, and it would warm to breakfast temperature in the hot room by morning.
Monday, September 30, 2013
Moc Bai - Bavet border curry
Would you expect to be fed well in a restaurant - a shack, really - that caters only to border-crossing buses and has no competition for miles (if at all, given the tourist-herding)?
If I had ordered this in, say, a Thai place in the States, I would have raved about it and festooned it with lots of shiny Yelp stars. Really! It wasn't just the low expectations!
The pumpkin had the texture of a good Thanksgiving roast yam, but without the marshmallowy over-sweetness (obviously), while the chicken pieces split between my teeth to reveal miles of unsinewed white meat, a vanishingly rare experience in Asia, where they like their chicken, bony and full of cartilage.
The best part, though, was how heavy-handed the herbs turned out to be. The fish-mint and the cilantro raced down the side of my tongue like Olympic sprinters, while the bitterness of the banana flowers sat comfortably in the back.
Somehow, the noodles managed to remain un-soggy despite being drenched in red curry, and I happily chopsticked the whole pile into my mouth well before the half hour deadline to get back on the bus!
Of course not. You expect boiled spam, waterlogged noodles, fridge-burned rice, and soggy boiled vegetables. Whatever the lowest standard for restaurants is in whatever country you're in, you expect that. Plus exorbitant price-gouging. And gruff service. And touts, if you're in Asia. Lots and lots of touts.
Essentially, if you're smart, you bring sufficient snacks to avoid the process entirely.
On the Mekong Express from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, I was not smart. I had brought only a handful of mangosteens, which meant that I got to the border restaurant starving and with purplish-red stained hands that made me look like I had just murdered someone.
Expecting absolutely nothing in the way of edibility, I approached the carts and grudgingly ordered a red curry noodle dish. Prices were carefully written in dollars ($0.75), dong (15000d), and riel (3000r). The lady grabbed a clump of fresh vermicelli noodles with tongs, plunked them into an empty bowl, ladled out chicken and pumpkin from a big silver pot, and covered the whole thing in red sauce. Then, to my delight (for the process up until then didn't necessarily bode excitingly) she opened a container of veggies and herbs and started sprinkling banana flowers, fried onions, fish-mint, cilantro, and basil all over the place.
Then, with a subtle flourish, she slid a spatula under the whole mess and flipped it like a big wet round noodly pancake!
 |
| Which is why no herbs are visible in this picture. |
The pumpkin had the texture of a good Thanksgiving roast yam, but without the marshmallowy over-sweetness (obviously), while the chicken pieces split between my teeth to reveal miles of unsinewed white meat, a vanishingly rare experience in Asia, where they like their chicken, bony and full of cartilage.
The best part, though, was how heavy-handed the herbs turned out to be. The fish-mint and the cilantro raced down the side of my tongue like Olympic sprinters, while the bitterness of the banana flowers sat comfortably in the back.
Somehow, the noodles managed to remain un-soggy despite being drenched in red curry, and I happily chopsticked the whole pile into my mouth well before the half hour deadline to get back on the bus!
Friday, September 20, 2013
Frogs in Vietnam, frogs in Cambodia
I. Frogs in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City)
In District 1, just to the northwest of the Phạm Ngũ Lão backpacker district, a sign shouted, "CHÁO ẾCH SINGAPORE!" at me from across the street.
"Singaporean frog porridge?" I said to Julian with a question mark in my voice, like he would know, Frog porridge didn't sound familiar. I thought it was more probable that I was getting my diacriticals mixed up, like always.
But I was pretty sure, at least, that the sign didn't say "hello frog" (chào ếch), so we went in and sat down.
Yep, frog porridge! Or rather, frog hot pot with a bowl of porridge on the side.
Beyond the cliché "it tastes like chicken!" I never heard much of a description of frog meat before I ate it on this trip. I had no idea what to expect.
Allow me to elaborate: it does taste like chicken. It tastes like chicken that's been crossed with eel. And it's slippery and tender and encircled with tiny veins that look like tiny rubber bands holding the meat on the bone.
This particular frog was chopped up and marinated in a thick, syrupy sweet soy sauce that dripped tendrils into the porridge like honey into Cream of Wheat when I mixed the bowls together.
---
II. Frogs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
The frogs in Vietnam were relatively unadorned, and retained enough of their original shape, texture and flavor that they were unmistakably frogs. The Cambodian dish, on the contrary, was so heavily stir-fried and coated in all sorts of spices that the meat serving as a vehicle for all that spice was practically irrelevant. Tiny bones flexed and crunched, but that was the only clue.
In a raucous outdoor restaurant that had only beer and Fanta as refreshment options, I ordered something called 'Hot fried with frog', knowing it could be absolutely anything.
In District 1, just to the northwest of the Phạm Ngũ Lão backpacker district, a sign shouted, "CHÁO ẾCH SINGAPORE!" at me from across the street.
"Singaporean frog porridge?" I said to Julian with a question mark in my voice, like he would know, Frog porridge didn't sound familiar. I thought it was more probable that I was getting my diacriticals mixed up, like always.
But I was pretty sure, at least, that the sign didn't say "hello frog" (chào ếch), so we went in and sat down.
Yep, frog porridge! Or rather, frog hot pot with a bowl of porridge on the side.
Beyond the cliché "it tastes like chicken!" I never heard much of a description of frog meat before I ate it on this trip. I had no idea what to expect.
Allow me to elaborate: it does taste like chicken. It tastes like chicken that's been crossed with eel. And it's slippery and tender and encircled with tiny veins that look like tiny rubber bands holding the meat on the bone.
This particular frog was chopped up and marinated in a thick, syrupy sweet soy sauce that dripped tendrils into the porridge like honey into Cream of Wheat when I mixed the bowls together.
---
II. Frogs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
The frogs in Vietnam were relatively unadorned, and retained enough of their original shape, texture and flavor that they were unmistakably frogs. The Cambodian dish, on the contrary, was so heavily stir-fried and coated in all sorts of spices that the meat serving as a vehicle for all that spice was practically irrelevant. Tiny bones flexed and crunched, but that was the only clue.
In a raucous outdoor restaurant that had only beer and Fanta as refreshment options, I ordered something called 'Hot fried with frog', knowing it could be absolutely anything.
Like most of the mystery Cambodian stir fries I had, it came out liberally coated in lemongrass, an assortment of green leaves and herbs, and wildly spicy red chili specks. This was the better frog dish by far. It had a bar wings sort of feel, a carefree application of flavor, made to meld with alcohol. I came very close to wishing I was a drinker.
Instead, we managed to flag down a wandering vendor who was studiously ignoring the table of foreigners and got him to sell me a baggie of hardboiled quail eggs. Dragged through the tamarind sauce Julian had on his boring vegetarian noodles, they were the perfect accompaniment.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Crabs in China, crabs in Cambodia
I. Crabs in China (Ruili, Yunnan)
Our first view of Ruili's night market came through waves of rain, crashing down from the sky like we were walking under the world's biggest waterfall. The streets quickly flooded and became streams. We crossed several in water up to mid-calf.
When we got to the market, it was ghostly. Tarps rattled in the wind, covering deserted stalls. The stalls were filled with coolers, which were empty and draped in cloth and cardboard. Only a few places were open. In one, one drenched diner sat, bedraggledly sipping a papaya smoothie.
We tried again a week later after a scorching day spent on the Burmese border, watching villagers traverse the tiny border river using unofficial makeshift bamboo bridges or merely wading with their pant legs rolled up. I wanted to find crab to eat; we'd seen rows and rows of workers packing their little silvery blue bodies up into crates bound for the rest of Yunnan.
The night was clear and the market was hopping. Vendors jostled for space at the edges of a massive inner dining area, their carts all identically piled with skewered meat, snails, crabs, crickets, worms, and baby bees.
I wasn't that hungry, because, as I recall, I had had about 40 pork and green onion dumplings for lunch, but the night market vendors only sold their merchandise in one size: gigantic-Chinese-family-sharing-size, for 50 kuai (~$8.25).
Julian, of course, refused to eat any of the creatures on offer, so he was tasked with trying to convince the vendors to give me a smaller portion at a smaller price. Some were mildly amused by the question (in a why-would-I-even-entertain-that sort of way), and some were offended by it (in a you-want-less-of-my-delicious-food?!?! kind of way).
One, though, didn't understand the question, or else didn't care. "40 kuai," she said with a shrug and a take-it-or-leave it flip of her wok-stirring spatula. As a normally utterly ineffective bargainer, I was shocked but pleased by this turn of events: an unintentional bargain!
As the dish was set in front of me and I smelled the garlic and chilies wafting up into the air, all my hunger came rushing back somehow. The dumplings, though still digesting, became a distant memory, as though I had eaten them in a dream. It was a good thing I hadn't gotten a half-order. I ate every last claw.
The crabs' sauce was so dark and thick it was tough to distinguish the basil leaves from the undercurrent of pounded chilies. At first I tried to dig the meat out with chopsticks, but quickly came to realize it was a futile endeavor. I pulled a rubber band from my pocket, tied my hair back, pushed wayward strands behind my ear, and dug into the bowl with both bare hands like the sauced-up and hot-oiled crab bodies and claws were nothing more than a bowl of jelly beans.
Before long, I couldn't pick up my drink without it slipping right out of my absolutely sauce-coated hands. I dug my fingers under carapaces and wormed my way into tiny claw crevices. I scraped claw adductors with my teeth and smeared my cheeks trying to get my tongue all the way into some of the spaces between organs.
The garlic had been stir-fried so thoroughly that it could be eaten in chunks right along with the crabmeat, which was good since they were indistinguishable in color. The chilies' flavor had seeped into everything so thoroughly that eating them directly had no spicy effect beyond the effect of the rest of the dish, which was very hot. At first, my tongue delightedly bounced from garlic to ocean to spicy to herby and back, but before long it started tingling and burning them all together.
On the way out, we told the crabs' cook that her work had been amazing. She barely nodded as she kept stirring someone else's eventual dinner in her wok; she knew.
---
II. Crabs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
Khmer cuisine is one of those cuisines that hasn't been widely exported to the U.S. Last year, I was persistent enough to ferret out a few places in Long Beach, but apart from those tastes, I had no idea what to expect when I found myself on a bus to Phnom Penh earlier this week.
Luckily, Cambodia and Vietnam share the custom of, at nightfall, dragging out hundreds of plastic chairs and tables along with countless tanks of fresh shellfish. They do this in front of places that remained shuttered and gated all day. A place that was fixing motorbikes at noon might be tossing sea snails with lemongrass at nine. And language barriers can't stop me from recognizing those telltale shells.
There was one such place right down the street from our hostel. It was called the Oyster House. They had a simple one page menu largely consisting of English translations that left a lot to the imagination. This wasn't unusual in Phnom Penh, a capital with a much higher general English level than Ho Chi Minh City - enough English to have translations, not enough English to have detailed translations. One restaurant, for example, listed a particular soup as 'Khmer spice soup' and what came out was full of pumpkins, wintermelon, green beans, eggplant, and cucumbers.
My crab dish was an exception, though - it was called "Shake Sea Crab with Salt and Chili".
Which is exactly what it was.
It came out unadorned with any sort of silverware altogether, which confused me for a good minute. My stomach was rumblings and I couldn't get any meat out! Was I supposed to scrape the brain meat with my fingers and then stare at the legs wistfully?
No: I watched the locals. They were cracking the legs with their teeth.
Despite knowing my dentist would wince if she saw me, and despite the fact that some of the legs were spiky, I did the same. The crabs were small, about the same size as my palm. Their open heads were full of potent pepper seeds and sea salt; the legs were grilled until they could almost be crunched like BBQ flavored potato chips. To get the tiny wedges of meat out of their skinny limbs was like performing hand surgery, but ultimately worth it. The seasoning was simple, but the crabs were effortlessly, lightly fresh, the kind of fresh you only get in the States by paying over $30 per head or by going out in a boat yourself. Getting them for $1.50 was an experience I knew I shouldn't take for granted.
But they were tiny... so I couldn't help ordering some of the restaurant's namesake afterwards.
Our first view of Ruili's night market came through waves of rain, crashing down from the sky like we were walking under the world's biggest waterfall. The streets quickly flooded and became streams. We crossed several in water up to mid-calf.
When we got to the market, it was ghostly. Tarps rattled in the wind, covering deserted stalls. The stalls were filled with coolers, which were empty and draped in cloth and cardboard. Only a few places were open. In one, one drenched diner sat, bedraggledly sipping a papaya smoothie.
We tried again a week later after a scorching day spent on the Burmese border, watching villagers traverse the tiny border river using unofficial makeshift bamboo bridges or merely wading with their pant legs rolled up. I wanted to find crab to eat; we'd seen rows and rows of workers packing their little silvery blue bodies up into crates bound for the rest of Yunnan.
The night was clear and the market was hopping. Vendors jostled for space at the edges of a massive inner dining area, their carts all identically piled with skewered meat, snails, crabs, crickets, worms, and baby bees.
 |
| View from inside the covered area, with a solid border of stalls |
Julian, of course, refused to eat any of the creatures on offer, so he was tasked with trying to convince the vendors to give me a smaller portion at a smaller price. Some were mildly amused by the question (in a why-would-I-even-entertain-that sort of way), and some were offended by it (in a you-want-less-of-my-delicious-food?!?! kind of way).
One, though, didn't understand the question, or else didn't care. "40 kuai," she said with a shrug and a take-it-or-leave it flip of her wok-stirring spatula. As a normally utterly ineffective bargainer, I was shocked but pleased by this turn of events: an unintentional bargain!
 |
| Chopped crabs, passion fruit juice, mango shake |
The crabs' sauce was so dark and thick it was tough to distinguish the basil leaves from the undercurrent of pounded chilies. At first I tried to dig the meat out with chopsticks, but quickly came to realize it was a futile endeavor. I pulled a rubber band from my pocket, tied my hair back, pushed wayward strands behind my ear, and dug into the bowl with both bare hands like the sauced-up and hot-oiled crab bodies and claws were nothing more than a bowl of jelly beans.
Before long, I couldn't pick up my drink without it slipping right out of my absolutely sauce-coated hands. I dug my fingers under carapaces and wormed my way into tiny claw crevices. I scraped claw adductors with my teeth and smeared my cheeks trying to get my tongue all the way into some of the spaces between organs.
The garlic had been stir-fried so thoroughly that it could be eaten in chunks right along with the crabmeat, which was good since they were indistinguishable in color. The chilies' flavor had seeped into everything so thoroughly that eating them directly had no spicy effect beyond the effect of the rest of the dish, which was very hot. At first, my tongue delightedly bounced from garlic to ocean to spicy to herby and back, but before long it started tingling and burning them all together.
On the way out, we told the crabs' cook that her work had been amazing. She barely nodded as she kept stirring someone else's eventual dinner in her wok; she knew.
---
II. Crabs in Cambodia (Phnom Penh)
Khmer cuisine is one of those cuisines that hasn't been widely exported to the U.S. Last year, I was persistent enough to ferret out a few places in Long Beach, but apart from those tastes, I had no idea what to expect when I found myself on a bus to Phnom Penh earlier this week.
Luckily, Cambodia and Vietnam share the custom of, at nightfall, dragging out hundreds of plastic chairs and tables along with countless tanks of fresh shellfish. They do this in front of places that remained shuttered and gated all day. A place that was fixing motorbikes at noon might be tossing sea snails with lemongrass at nine. And language barriers can't stop me from recognizing those telltale shells.
There was one such place right down the street from our hostel. It was called the Oyster House. They had a simple one page menu largely consisting of English translations that left a lot to the imagination. This wasn't unusual in Phnom Penh, a capital with a much higher general English level than Ho Chi Minh City - enough English to have translations, not enough English to have detailed translations. One restaurant, for example, listed a particular soup as 'Khmer spice soup' and what came out was full of pumpkins, wintermelon, green beans, eggplant, and cucumbers.
My crab dish was an exception, though - it was called "Shake Sea Crab with Salt and Chili".
Which is exactly what it was.
It came out unadorned with any sort of silverware altogether, which confused me for a good minute. My stomach was rumblings and I couldn't get any meat out! Was I supposed to scrape the brain meat with my fingers and then stare at the legs wistfully?
No: I watched the locals. They were cracking the legs with their teeth.
Despite knowing my dentist would wince if she saw me, and despite the fact that some of the legs were spiky, I did the same. The crabs were small, about the same size as my palm. Their open heads were full of potent pepper seeds and sea salt; the legs were grilled until they could almost be crunched like BBQ flavored potato chips. To get the tiny wedges of meat out of their skinny limbs was like performing hand surgery, but ultimately worth it. The seasoning was simple, but the crabs were effortlessly, lightly fresh, the kind of fresh you only get in the States by paying over $30 per head or by going out in a boat yourself. Getting them for $1.50 was an experience I knew I shouldn't take for granted.
But they were tiny... so I couldn't help ordering some of the restaurant's namesake afterwards.
.JPG) |
| Grilled oysters! |
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