Phnom Penh Restaurant Reviews – Shandong
Since taking over as 440 restaurant reviewer from the gin-sodden Lord Playboy (a man with more fingers in more pies than an octopus on quality-control duty at a pie factory), I make no apologies for rigorously investigating the best options in the mini Chinatown at the top end of 136.
And so Frank Rizzo and I returned again last weekend, this time to the distinctly utilitarian and canteen-ish Shandong (no smart veneers here) just three doors down from already reviewed Sechuan on a road that wasn’t quite as populated with stationary 4x4s as is customary on a weekend lunchtime.
There was a dearth of punters in the restaurant too and after taking my usual table (as close as possible to the standing air con unit), I noticed that we were all alone apart from a large table of Chinese women with big hair and small husbands who were at the free fruit stage of their meal already and at the far end of the room sat a couple of lentil-eating, unwashed anarcho-syndicalist white hippy girls. Rizzo told me that we should definitely hang around as scruffy, tattooed barang girls are rumored to quickly put out – especially to sad old sacks like us. He was joking of course – no way are we sad old sacks.
Soon after, the Chinese family and then the great unwashed backpackers departed and we were left alone with a pair of over-plucked teenage waitresses and the slightly aloof owner with a flat dried-up riverbed for a face who kept himself busy pottering and padding around making delicate adjustments to the fans and air con unit and maybe wondering where all the customers were this Saturday lunchtime before Khmer New Year.
The menu, like many on this strip, is confusingly long, but helpfully has a largish and glossy array of photos with mainly literate descriptions, so the punter has an approximate idea of what they are about to receive. I could have done without seeing a grisly Polaroid of newly cooked turtle, however, and was a little surprised that Shandong had this dish knowingly and openly on the menu.
The star of this week’s show was a pork dish ($3.50) consisting of hearty, paunchy and big-fisted strips of pork side (so fatty it could have been belly), slow braised in soy and sugar, served fatty and on a fulsome base of kai choy (which for anybody less expert than those of us who have just googled it, is Chinese mustard cabbage, described on the menu as ‘Asian vegetable, slightly sour, comes from market, salted, somewhere between a spinach and a cabbage ’) and mushrooms. The flavors worked well together and the meltingly soft and extraordinarily tender pork gave out masses of flavor after just a single suck. Apart from the high saturate fat content which was so rich that I wasn’t sure whether to call in at the pharmacy on the way home to stock up on Zantac, what’s not to like? I can quite honestly say that it was the richest and sweetest pork this half-Jew has ever eaten to usher in Passover week. Some might say it didn’t look so pretty on the plate, but for me it was the week’s great culinary treat, although if you had it every day, your deathbed might not be as far away as you had hoped.
Next we had a large platter of Kung Pao Chicken, ($4) a classic dish in Szechuan, consisting of diced marinated chicken, ginger, deep fried peanuts, diced carrots, and, the key ingredients, a generous handful of Sichuan peppercorns (giving the dish its ever so slightly numbing flavor) plus of course red chili peppers (of the sort to add flavor and volcanic bursts of heat but not to be eaten unless you are the Anglo-Indian girl I nearly married a few years ago) with which the dish was liberally spiked. It was very good indeed.
Then a plate of whole crab ($5,) arrived sitting alluringly on a satisfying bed of vermicelli noodles and a good, gutsy, soy based stock, well flavoured with pepper, garlic and coriander. It was delicious, despite Rizzo’s exasperation at the fiddly nature of extracting the juicy meat from the crab legs.
Finally, at Rizzo’s request, we had tofu with sweet green peppers and onions ($2.50) and the less said about this dismal affair the better: it being a dull flavorless misfire even in a supporting role.
When we’d finished eating and had taken our leave, we decided that the bland plate of tofu aside, three hits and one miss wasn’t too bad, and the bill of $19 for four dishes and two large bottles of Tsing Tao made Shandong a serviceable eating opportunity and well worth a punt for weekend lunch. Their hand- made noodles dishes are supposedly wonderful too, meaning we’ll have to return sometime.
Shandong Restaurant (Szechuan Chinese cuisine), St 136 (top end and just off Moniving), Phnom Penh, Cambodia
