Lunch and dinner

Just before lunch time I asked two colleagues where I could find a Khmer restaurant at a reasonable prince. They mentioned two restaurants that were expensive but there was a restaurant where lunch cost $2.00. I thought that would be great, that is only $0.25 more than in Kampong Cham.

The restaurant was a large covered space with a lot of white tables and chairs. We took a seat with another colleague. Lunch was served family style, four different dishes and a large bowl of rice.

The first dish was a soup with an almost woody vegetable stalks, a little beef and a spicy curry like sauce. The next dish was fried vegetables with a few (very few) pieces of beef this dish did not have much flavor. After the fried vegetables we were served a fish covered in diced vegetables. The fish looked very similar to the fish I had in Kampong Cham, the vegetables were not as good, in Kampong Cham there was more pineapple. Our last dish was beef in a peanut sauce with peanuts and more of the woody vegetable stalks.

As is the custom at most Khmer meals when food is served you start eating and stop talking. Not a word was said until we were done eating except "more rice?"

After riding my moto home, I walked to dinner. A new Indian restaurant just opened next to the guest house. It is possible that I was their first customer; they were still connecting the billboard to electricity while I was eating dinner. after I ordered one of the staff hopped on a moto and returned five minutes later with a bag of what appeared to be vegetables.

I ordered a Chicken Tali that came with rice, yogurt, spinach panier, garnishes, chicken marsala and lentils. Spicing of the dishes was just right. I ordered a butter nana assuming it would be small. I was wrong, it was the size of a large, platter.