Author Archives: Jeff Mudrick
Khmer 440 Reviews USA Donut
If you’ve ever enjoyed a serving of American Buffalo Wings, I can tell you where the wings sauce base came from – the curiously named USA Donut. For many years this small shop, run by a Khmer-American and now located…
K440 Reviews ‘Mike’s Burger House’
K440 dispatched Jeff Mudrick, creator of Phnom Penh’s best known gourmet burger, to ‘Mike’s’ to review Phnom Penh’s best known generic burger. Dedication The conversation with the editor of this fine journal went something like this: K440: “You know hamburgers….
Counterpunch: A Journalistic Horror Show?
Counterpunch, the left web journal founded by the late Alexander Cockburn and edited now by Jeffrey St. Clair, is on a roll when it comes to coverage of Cambodia. Following the positively ludicrous article written by Israel Shamir some months…
Historical Revisionism and the Contrarian Left: Counterpunch and the Case of Cambodia
“The noble title of dissident must be earned rather than claimed.” “Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence” – Christopher Hitchens Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens are gone. Contrarianism is alive, but whether it is well is an entirely different matter. The…
Phnom Penh Restaurant Reviews: Magnolia
For the best of seven years, I had the extreme pleasure of eating extraordinary Vietnamese food most everyday, prepared by a cook (who happened to be my wife) whose knowledge of her homeland’s gastronomy was encyclopedic and her culinary skills…
Being a Good Expat Son: A Technical Guide
If your mother in the U.S. is more Lifetime Channel and QVC than CNN and NatGeo, the way she views your living in Cambodia is that you may have just as well joined the French Foreign Legion. It goes without…
Phnom Penh Restaurant Reviews: Sophy’s Restaurant
Sophy has for the last nine years run Sophy’s Café in Long Beach California, where the largest Khmer community outside the Kingdom can be found. A California friend who has long frequented her Long Beach place enthusiastically recommended I try…
Dylan in Vietnam – the Concert
If one were looking for symbolism in Dylan’s first concert in Vietnam, one wouldn’t have to look any further than the venue itself. RMIT University, located 20 minutes from downtown Saigon in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 7, is a…
Housing the Homeless
The Cambodian government, I am told, has the largest government cabinet in the world, this year’s model upping the number to over 400 ministers, secretaries and undersecretaries. Tragically, many of these officials, having only an SUV and a villa or…
Cambodia: The Chomsky Problem
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Here in Cambodia, Noam Chomsky is without a doubt the guy everybody loves to hate. In expat circles, most have never read either his books, articles or reviews, but they certainly know of him as an apologist for the Khmer…