Phnomenon Interview
Mar 15th, 2006 by Jinja
Phnomenon Interview Editor Phil dishes up the details on how it came to be:
1. Are you a ‘foodie’? Do you have any special dietary needs or is it just that you like expanding your palate?
Foodie? Yes and no. I like quality scoff and swill, and talking about the process of how it was made, grown, butchered, or brewed but I can’t be bothered with the pretentiousness and exclusivity that tends to seep into conversations about food. As for dietary needs, there is a Chinese saying that says: “?????????” which means something along the lines of “if its back faces the sky, you can eat it”. I’m willing to try anything once, except for primates.
2. Why a food blog?
I didn’t want to be another Westerner who came to
3. Why “Phnomenon”? (And who designed the cool logo?)
I’m a devotee of the very bad pun. I designed the logo but the site is a vanilla implementation of the WordPress (www.wordpress.org) default layout. I’m in the process of re-doing the whole site layout in the same style as the logo but that process involves me learning the vagaries of CSS and having some spare time on my hands.
Nobody has written anything about the street food in
5. Worst meal in
Nhoam K’daam Prai (Fermented Freshwater Crab Salad) in Siem Reap at a classic plastic-chair-and-metal-table Khmer restaurant with some of my Khmer workmates. While they’re alive, the freshwater crab lives in holes in the rice paddy, where it plays an important role in the ecosystem as a parasite magnet. When they’re captured and dead, Khmer people ferment them whole in their own juices and salt water, and then
6. Contenders for best meal?
That’s very difficult. Learning to cook my own fish amok (a mousseline Khmer fish curry) has been one of my highlights, as is my weekend morning routine of shopping at the local markets and grazing on whatever street food I happen to catch sight of along the way. I almost enjoy the process of finding the food as much as the meal
itself.
7. Does exploring cuisine give you additional insights into local life?
Knowing anything about the local food automatically gives you something in common with everyone. Khmer people can be extremely passionate about their own cuisine, especially their rice and dried fish. I can’t tell the difference between the nation of origin of rice, but Khmer people can, and will complain vociferously if it isn’t Cambodian.
8. How long will you stay in
My plan is (loosely) two years in
There is also a pantheon of awful beer to be tasted, but I hope I can knock that over quickly.
9. Where do you see your blog going post-Cambodia, if at all?
I’ll end it, unless people continue to visit or I can hand over the keys to a successor. One of the problems with writing anything about restaurants or bars in
10. If Phnomenon was edible what would its culinary analogue be?
A deep-fried beard of bees: crispy on the outside, buzzing and stinging on the inside.
