Review: Top Cat in the Alley
Part diner, part dive bar, joints like Alley Cat simply don’t exist elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The fact that they celebrated their sixth anniversary last year is significant in a town where bars close quicker than a speeding motodop. It’s a cafe with character – and characters. Step forward owner Mark Eastty and lugubrious front man Dallas, responsible for the trademark Top Cat mural and Tex-Mex desert landscape. They give the venue a sense of drama and permanence. The diner booths are wonderfully flexible – the largest can accommodate 10, or two sprawled flat-out at quiet times.
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- 10560 reads
Naturae Cafe @ The 240
Many of the Phnom Penh venues frequented by a large number of expats have a tendency to multitask. Cafes come complete with a small craft boutique, restaurants have their own art gallery. The exemplar par excellence of this trend is The 240. Upstairs, it is a boutique hotel, downstairs there is a shop specialising in organic and ecologically friendly food and cleaning products, this blends seamlessly into a café area, ambling gently out into the bijoux, leafy, courtyard.
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- 10216 reads
A Little Latin Spirit in Daunh Penh - The Latin Quarter
It is a striking sign of globalisation that an Englishman can eat South American cuisine in the heart of South East Asia. Yet here in Phnom Penh, you can dine out at The Latin Quarter on a mixture of dishes from all corners of Latin America, prepared by Khmer chefs (albeit under the watchful eye of the restaurant’s Uruguayan manager Diego). The colonial setting, and a heady pick’n’mix of Latin music styles streaming out of the PA system, transport you thousands of miles away, to the far barrios of Buenos Aires, Bogota, Montevideo and Havana.
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- 10721 reads
Brasserie du Port – A rich, buttery taste of the South of France
Brasserie du Port – A rich, buttery taste of the South of France
For a long time, the area around the Night Market was like a frontier country for the average ex-pat, A border land beyond which lay uncharted territory and signs which read ‘Here Be Monsters…And No Nice Restaurants!’.
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- 10303 reads
Xayoh Grillhouse brings steak culture to the capital
Xayoh Grillhouse started as the first grillhouse in town. Copying the concepts of american steakhouses, it offers steaks and burgers. Recently added was a superburger. But to be honest: there are better places for steaks. Althought they may try heir best, staff has not much clue about what they serve, the baked tomatoes look disgusting, and the overall presentation is poor.
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- 19937 reads
Chow @ The Quay Hotel - An Asiatic Taste of Spain
The entrance to Chow is a large glass frontage, facing out onto the riverfront, supported by what looks like the back of a Boeing 747 plane. This leads into a post-modern, chic atmosphere, with gently contoured shapes contrasting with clear, straight lines, geometric patterns and metallic sheen. So we have smoothly curving, orchid-shaped chairs, playing off against a long, sleek, distinctly Asian looking bar.
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- 9144 reads
Sophy's - Northern Khmer Cooking with a Long Beach Sensibility
Sophy's granny taught her to cook rice at the age of nine, because, if she couldn’t cook, how on earth would she ever get a good husband. Her granny’s efforts both succeeded and failed. Thiry odd years later, she is still contentedly unmarried, having not yet snared that elusive husband her granny so coveted, but she has been the chef and proprietor of a highly successful Cambodian restaurant in Long Beach, Califronia for over ten years.
Now she has decided to chance her arm, after 15 years or so of her brother’s persistent prodding, at opening a restaurant in the motherland .
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- 22428 reads
Cadillac Restaurant - Easy Ridin'
Cadillac’s comfortable chairs and laughs spill out onto the riverfront pavement to let you know this is the sort of place to go for an unpretentious, good quality meal. Inside, a mostly American and Australian crowd sit for beers, chow down on home-comfort food, or watch sports on one of the two TVs positioned above the bar. The quirky décor mixes well with the chipper music selection to create a feeling of easy-going homeliness.
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- 17710 reads
Viva Mexican cafe opens in Phnom Penh
Mexican fare is not normally my first food of choice, however when one of our members tipped me off that Viva had opened in Phnom Penh, my tastes buds started screaming for Quesadillas.
It was last June that I had originally tasted Viva's great food on a trip to Siem Reap and on hearing that they had opened in Phnom Penh, there was no point in fighting the urge.
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- 25670 reads
Setsara - 278s Thai Tongue Tingler
In recent years, the stretch of street 278 lying between 51 and 63 has become something of an expat haven; a tightly packed corridor of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, cafés, craft shops and music stores. Not as only-child-in-a-strop, hey-look-at-me-look-at-me brash as the riverfront, it has a slightly more low key charm all of its own.
A keystone of the 278 scene is Setsara, the Thai restaurant sister to Equinox’s bolshy, rock'n'roll tavern, older brother.
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- 14366 reads