Le Marmite: Thank God for the French (Well, Sometimes)

Le Marmite
#80, Oknha Ing Bun Hoaw, St 108, Corner of Peam (St 51)
023 998 161


Phnom Penh has a lot of French restaurants - not surprising, for a former French colony. A French friend of mine, who lives in Thailand, says he comes to Cambodia mostly to eat good French food. I'm certainly not complaining about the ready availability of boeuf bourguignon, crepes, and steak frites in this part of the world.

Le Marmite is a rather worthy contender in the PP French food scene, located in a somewhat out of the way spot close to Wat Phnom. It's on a kind of seedy looking block and looks less than sexy from the outside - which kept me away for a while - but is very salubrious and contemporary on the inside.

The menu hits up all the usual French classics—alongside a good selection of pasta— with a lot of revolving specials, and is quite reasonably priced. Naturally, there's a good wine list.



These little pastries containing gorgonzola and ham were absolutely fantastic, served alongside a small, garlicky salad. Buttery puff-pastry and a healthy amount of cheese: would order again. I'm kind of fantasizing about them right now.



My tragically lactose-intolerant boyfriend went with the spaghetti bolognese, which was quite good and prepared in the traditional (read: not painfully saturated with tomato) style. Portion sizes are not huge here, as my boyfriend observed, although nothing is ever quite large enough for a very tall Iowa boy transplanted to the Land of Tiny Things (and people).

More buffet coverage coming soon to a blog near you. Actually, Phnom Penh has a pretty healthy number of all-you-can eat places, though they must be hunted for, at least more so than in the USA.

Nak Won Korean Restaurant: Family Korean in The Dark Heart of Phnom Penh

Nak Won Korean Restaurant
Street 222, #40, Corner of Street 63
Phnom Penh, Cambodia



Cambodia happens to have a lot of Korean expats, and all those Korean expats need somewhere to eat - which means Phnom Penh is lousy with Korean eateries. From Korean BBQ places to casual lunch spots to fast-food chains of Korean origin, the city is lousy with Korean foodstuff. As for me? I'm thrilled. My mother lived in Seoul when she was a kid and I grew up eating kimchi - Korean is one of my favorite cuisines of all time. So I was happy to run across the Nak Won Korean Restaurant, conveniently located near my workplace.



Nak Won is a small, quiet, and family run place, set inside what is obviously one of Phnom Penh's trademark expat-homes. There is an English menu but the staff's evident surprise when I ambled in indicates there isn't much barang custom here. No one speaks much English, but the photo menu is helpful. (A few visits and some translation from other patrons has ingratiated me with the staff, mostly because I answered the Ultimate Question of "Why is a white girl devouring that much kimchi?" to their satisfaction).

The lunch menu bears the advantage of being cheap and featuring a pretty healthy variety of dishes. There's pork galbi, stir-fried pork with chili sauce, stir-fried beef, bi-bim-bap, kimchi stew, beef soup, Korean pancakes (pajun), Korean "sushi" (gimbap), galbi stew, grilled fish, and a number of large multiple-person dishes. And as you may perhaps be able to tell by the photo above, the banchan (side dishes) are just plain fantastic - and re-fillable. Meals also come with a tasty soy-bean-pumpkin-chili-onion soup I find rather addictive, and watermelon for dessert.

It's definitely the tastiest kimchi I've had in town. Further, they mix it up considerably, which is important for a Korean restaurant's banchan options. (For the die-hards - yes, they've got purple rice. The real deal).




They do a fine turn with the grilled meats here. This is grilled chicken in a typical slightly sweet Korean marinade ($7). Dark meat (the good stuff) and served with lettuce and Korean bean paste to wrap it all up in. A good light lunch. One interesting thing about Korean food is that I stuff myself silly whenever I eat it, but it's inherently reasonably light - well, okay, until you get to the galbi....



They also do a very fine turn with pork galbi. A huge serve at $7 bucks and juicy, delicious, and on-the-bone. I couldn't finish it and was regarded with some concern by the male half of the husband-wife pair that run the place. I resorted to extremely positive hand-gestures. Yum.



I befriended two Korean brothers on my last visit, who spoke English and were amused enough by my enthusiasm for kimchi to get a conversation started. I was quickly gifted some chilled soju, taught some rudimentary Korean phrases and etiquette, we exchanged business cards, and then they gave me a bowl of the excellent spicy chicken stew they'd ordered - a massive, $25 dollar serve that's suitable for three or more. One of the guys ended up †hrowing the leftover purple rice and panchan in with the dredges of the stew, putting the heat back on, and making a helluva tasty impromptu bibimbap. Clever!

Liuzza's By the Track: I Thank My Various Gods for Gumbo

Liuzza's By The Track
1518 North Lopez Street
New Orleans, LA 70119-3029
(504) 218-7888



Liuzzas by the Track is over by the fairgrounds, in the leafy, green, and blissfully ambling tourist free environs of Midcity. Liuzzas bills itself as a neighborhood cafe, and, unlike most joints that claim this status, actually is one: locals shoot the shit and watch sports on television here and get out of the heat. The kitchen speciality is po-boys and gumbo, with the barbecued shrimp po-boy given particular emphasis on the menu: I came here to try out the gumbo.

And I was hungry. I'd ridden a ways here from my apartment in the Garden District on my trusty and only slightly embarrassing BMX bicycle. More importantly, it was late May and New Orleans summer weather had really kicked in, inflicting Mumbai-like levels of blistering heat and humidity upon us poor permant residents. Not that I'd be a permanant resident long: I was packing up my apartment and heading back to Sacramento, prior to moving to, well, Cambodia. Long story short, this gumbo was sort of a last-gasp gumbo, a paen to New Orlean gumbos (if you will). That makes it sound real important.


Luckily, Liuzza's gumbo is awesome. It has a distinctive oregano heavy and very Italian flavor that works perfectly with the fatty and delicious andouille and shrimp and oysters. It's a light-textured gumbo with a lot of meat and a lot of delicious animal fat, and a good level of built in spice: I was pleased to find that I only had to add a smidgen of Crystal instead of my usual vigorous and extended shake-shake-shake. I dumped some saltines on top and horked the gumbo down, listening to folks around me discuss the oil spill, the horrors of the weather, and The Crazy Ass Things We Did Last Weekend You Won't Believe It: now that's what I call home, or at least something approximating a spiritual base, with gumbo at the center of it. I could see my bike outside. I had to sell it the next day. I didn't want to.

I am going to miss New Orleans, and I am going to miss gumbo. Maybe I can make it in Phnom Penh. Well, maybe.

Dick and Jenny's: Good Food, Yet More Double-Names

Dick and Jenny's
4501 Tchoupitoulas St
New Orleans, LA
70115


What is it with double named restaurants in New and Orleans? They're everywhere. Dick and Jenny's, located on Tchop near Tipitinas, functions as a well-loved neighborhood restaurant, catering more to a local set then to out of towners in desperate need of oyster po-boys and drinks in neon colors. The restaurant has been in flux in the past couple of years and has seen a succession of chefs go in - and out - of its doors, prompting criticisms of its highly creative but occasionally over-ambitious menu. But in 2010, ex-Flying Burrito chef Daniel Smith came on board and retooled (and simplified) the highly seasonal menu offerings, retaining the joint's slightly nutty flavor aesthetic in the process.

We arrived at 8:30 PM on a week-night and were suprised to find a crowd waiting to be seated. No reservations are taken, so be prepared to settle in at the lounge for a bit - booze and fried oysters are mercifully available in Purgatory.



Fried green tomatoes with remoulade sauce, the eternal appetizer. This dish was supposedly invented at the doughty Upperline Restaurant, and the combo of crispy fried tomatoes with creamy and spicy shrimp remoulaude has become a first-course juggernaut in the area. Dick and Jenny's serves theirs with both a not-too-spicy shrimp remoulade and a sort of creamy, mushroom-red pepper saute. Both sauces are pretty good in tandem with the crispy tomatoes, and it's certainly, well, local.


Meals at Dick and Jenny's are served with some good, if cakey, cornbread.



I went with one of the spring specials, the Gulf Seafood BBQ stew. This mess of sea creature is prepared with bronzed flounder, pan roasted shellfish (mostly shrimps), and stone ground grits, served in an Abita Amber-rosemary sauce. This dish was trying to riff on shrimp and grits and managed to suceed, avoiding D&J's occasional bouts of culinary ADHD. The smoky and thick sauce and the rich grits provided a nice foil to the fresh and gently cooked seafood. This was a fine Spring dish, and yet another rationale for demanding the severed heads of the BP board of executives. You know how it goes.



My dad ordered the special "crawfish boil" dish, which combined crawfish tails, sausage, baby corn, and rice in a crawfish-boil spiced tomato sauce. The idea of the dish is an interesting one, but the execution proved that crawfish boils may best be left un-desconstructed: the mundane, obviously Cajun Seasoned flavor of the sauce overwhelmed the delicate, fatty flavor of good mudbug. And the baby corn additions? Just plain weird. Folks, baby corn don't taste nothing like corn. (

Speaking of. Crawfish freaks need to make a bee-line for the Maple Leaf when it does its free Thursday night crawfish boils. Dudes out back drinking beer dump a bunch of stuff in the crawfish pot, including pork chops, boudin, whole cloves of garlic and Hebrew National hot-dogs, then spread it all out on a bunch of greasy folding tables for the music loving public to dive head-first into. Everyone stands around the trough and shucks crawfish with their spiritual brothers, squirreling away particularly tasty tidbits in the spirit of honest competition. Everyone ends the evening smelling of crap cigarettes, crawfish boil and pervasive body odor with just a little bit of Jager tossed in (somewhere in the air) to keep em' honest. What an Authentic New Orleans Life Experience!)

My mom chose the fried soft shell crab in a seafood green curry broth served over a sort of savory bread pudding. Sounds tasty and it certainly was, but the dish was devastatingly rich- even I couldn't finish it, and I am the family's designated Cleaner of Plates. The freakishly huge crab wasn't overfried, and the green curry sauce had a rich, dense coconut flavor. A few lightening touches and a less mammoth serving size could turn this selection into a real winner.

Atmosphere? Yeah, they've got it here. Dick and Jenny's was built out of the shell of an old grocery and has a quirky, slightly run-down ambiance, accompanied by some overly moody lighting. (Seriously, would it kill y'all to toss in an extra lamp or two? Sometimes I do like seeing my food).

Seek out Dick and Jenny's if you're hunting a unique NOLA neighborhood restaurant with a never-boring take on Cajun and Creole classics. The menu is by no means infallible, but its interesting choices will certainly prevent the sudden narcolepsy brought on by yet another place specializing in goddamn shrimp po-boys and seafood gumbo and red-beans-and-rice on days not Monday, jesus god in heaven. Order a drink, have a loud conversation, and pretend you're cool enough to know the "real" New Orleans. Though of course none of us do, can never really know. But that is philosophy, and for another time.