Cambodian Street Food
Like most Asians, Cambodians love to eat and street food can be found in abundance at the markets and on the footpaths, roads and lanes of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. These are my favourite Cambodian street food snacks. The repertoire of street food snacks and dishes in Cambodia may not be as wide or as diverse as that of Vietnam or Thailand, due to the decades of poverty, suffering and war, not to mention the absence of any kind of culture and enjoyment, let alone culinary culture, during the brutal Khmer Rouge years in the late 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s most Cambodians were simply concerned with how they were going to put a meal on the table that night to feed the family. As the economy and everyday life has improved, so too has the food. It’s common to see soup and noodle stalls set up in the morning and at lunch and to find an array of snacks being sold in the late afternoon and evenings, generally distinguished by plumes of smoke from smouldering cha