CAMBODIA'S NEW CROP
chicken over coals on the same sort of clay brazier his ancestors have used for 2,000 years. He whooshes away a few flies lured in by the enticing aromas as he plates up on a hefty wooden table of the kind his father and uncles would drink beer around after a day in the rice fields.
On paper, Mengly is the least experienced of Siem Reap’s crop of New Cambodian chefs. He graduated from hospitality school in 2011 and only started to cook in 2013, making burgers and pasta in a popular expat bar before progressing to Mediterranean food at a local café. After a stint as head chef at NGO training restaurant Spoons, he moved on again, opening Pou a year ago.
The reason for Mengly’s rapid success is immediately obvious when you lay eyes on his vibrant plates with their grids and licks of color and abundance of edible flowers. But for all their visual appeal and creativity, what he is dishing up is very traditional. His take on a teuk kroeung, a rich, fishy, currylike sauce made from red kroeung paste and mango, is more attractive than any I’ve seen whipped up by an aunty, with a small grilled fish served separately on the side, leaves and flowers arranged prettily around a mound of fermented rice noodles, and dots of chili oil adding a modern touch. But close my eyes and I’m tasting a classic teuk kroeung—the chef later divulges that he uses his grandmother’s recipe.
Mengly grew up in Siem Reap, but on his school holidays his mother sent him to the market town of Dam Dek where he spent time cooking with his grandma. “We made all kinds of strange things like banana pickle with fish—she was always making lots of pickles,” Mengly tells me. Back home, he’d help his mother in the kitchen, forage for wild leaves, and go fishing with his dad. It’s that food from the countryside that is his source of inspiration today.
“All I am doing is presenting local ingredients that people don’t normally see—like beehive and red ants—in new ways with beautiful plating. If people travel here to taste real Cambodian food, I want to be sure that’s what they’re served.” EMBASSY Chefs Pol Kimsan, 34, and Sok Kimsan, 32, share the same inspirations and desires as their male counterparts, yet their European-looking cuisine and modish restaurant couldn’t be more different.
Embassy comes as a surprise to diners who seek it out. Firstly, it’s secreted away in the back of a tourist complex that is home to a Hard Rock Cafe franchise. Secondly, the traditional-style two-story building has a modern interior highlighted by orange accents, sleek modernist chairs, and a central chandelier that illuminates the room. The decor feels at odds with the cuisine, which its chefs describe as “100 percent Cambodian,” despite its frequent labeling as Cambodian-European fusion.
But what really makes Embassy stand out is the fact that it’s managed by an all-female team of warm, friendly women who are as confident waiting tables as they are in the kitchen. With its outstanding service and decent wine list, this could also be the closest thing Siem Reap has to a proper fine-dining restaurant. Like Mie Café, Embassy is full most nights and it’s next to impossible to get a weekend dinner reservation.
Kampot-born Pol and Siem Reap-raised Sok—despite the shared surname, they are not related—oversee 10 restaurants as executive chefs of the city’s largest restaurant group, but Embassy is their baby. They too grew up helping their mothers from a young age. A very pregnant (with her second child) Sok tells me how she started cooking before she turned 11, making food for the 10 people in their household as well as planting vegetables and foraging, something she still does on her way to work. As for Pol, her mother was the village cook, as was her grandmother and great-grandmother before her. Responsible for catering Buddhist ceremonies, weddings, and funerals, it’s a position long respected in Cambodian society.
Sok says she spent two years planning the concept for Embassy, a labor of love that involved thumbing through old Khmer cook books, consulting family and friends across the country, and researching ingredients. The result: a repertoire of some 90 recipes and monthly, seven-course degustation menus of elegant modern Cambodian dishes that change according to the season. These might include a duck-egg omelet with spicy ground beef and red-ant eggs, grilled frog stuffed with minced pork belly and marinated in curry paste, or palmfruit sour soup cooked in lemongrass paste with pork rib and tamarind juice—a refined version of a traditional home-style broth that is rustic, hearty, and comforting.
“I only want to cook Cambodian food,” Sok tells me as we chat in a new dining room, added to accommodate the increasing number of bookings they’re receiving each night. Her dream? “To have a restaurant that everybody who comes to Siem Reap wants to go to,” she grins.