At times it’s frenetically busy, at others, tropically languorous, but one thing remains a constant in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. As life in the city makes its chuntering motor-rickshaw ride from the brash to the blissfully gentle, when it comes to food here, there are always surprises in store.
At Frizz restaurant on Street 240, for example, they’ll almost casually serve you perhaps the most delicious starter ever created – the Kampot rice noodle salad, a superb mix of bean sprouts, shrimps, coconut milk and saw leaves.
Yet a few blocks away, and at the strictly-for-connoisseurs end of the scale, a market stall around the Pasar Thmei will sell you a whole kilo of roasted grasshoppers for less than a dollar. Then, nearby on Kampuchea Krom, you can pick up a handful of crunchy dead beetles to munch down raw, or sprinkle in your stir-fry for an esoteric twist.
Indeed, these insectoid protein supplements were recently advocated by no less a person than Angelina Jolie, UN goodwill ambassador and movie actress, famed for her unconventional approach. On a recent visit to Cambodia she vowed to raise her kids on such unconventional staples.
Don’t despair, however, if one day you find yourself saying: ‘Not giant hairy tarantula again for dinner,’ (known as ah pieng, it is served dry-roasted and eaten a bit like crab). Recall instead that, for many years, Cambodia was also a part of a European empire, and while it may be difficult to discern the imprint of the old imperial stamp on the nation’s daily life these days, there is one particular area in which, thankfully, the presence of La Belle France remains eternal: the baguette.
Sold everywhere – off the backs of push bikes, from roadside stalls and even churned out by a string of giant bakeries – these quintessentially French bread sticks have somehow jumped across the cultural divide between Asia and Europe. Now, this ubiquitous foodstuff forms an unlikely staple of the Cambodian diet.
‘We sell hundreds of these every day,’ says Lim Thich, whose bakery, loosely translated as ‘Big Golden Pastry’, stands amid a jumble of shacks on National Route 6 as it heads through Phnom Penh’s scraggly outer rim. ‘People put cream cheese in them to eat on the road,’ he adds with a smile, ‘or they just eat them straight. Cambodians love these breads.’
Indeed, along the highways out of town, listen out for the cries of the bread sellers as they shout out ‘Pang!’ – only a consonant away from the French ‘Pain!’ (‘Bread!’).
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