VANCOUVER: Butter beef memories

There are some foods I can immediately link to certain times in my life. The butter beef, chicken wings and dry noodles at Phnom Penh mean I’m 11 again. My sister and I are sitting in our school uniforms, having walked several blocks from our parents’ office, waiting impatiently at the round table as the grownups chat about their day.

Phnom Penh has been located in the slightly less sketchy side of Vancouver’s Chinatown for more than 20 years. We used to come here every few weeks for Cambodian and Vietnamese food. It was faster and cheaper than rushing home for dinner sometimes.

There was never any argument about what we wanted. The butter beef was a given. The rare beef is sliced carpaccio-style with a lime, soy and fish sauce, and sprinkled with cilantro and fried shallots. I remember meticulously loading equal amounts of everything together to get the full flavours in each bite.

The chicken wings are deep fried with heavy doses of garlic, salt and pepper. The kicker is the lime-pepper dipping sauce on the side. I used to put a wing in the sauce bowl and leave it there to soak. (Okay, I still do that.)

The Cambodian dry egg noodles come with slices of pork, prawns, and liver. It’s “dry” because there’s no soup, though it’s served with broth and bean sprouts on the side that you can add yourself.

It’s tasty, featuring that savoury/sweet/sour punch so common in that part of the world.

On this visit, we also had the hot and sour soup with chicken. I really liked the clear broth with bean sprouts and pieces of pineapple.

The other two dishes we had were okay. The curry frog legs tasted like, well, chicken and the curry sauce tasted like the sweet Japanese stuff that comes out of a box in cubes.

The oyster omelette tasted much better than it sounds but I found the texture a bit gummy inside. My mom guessed some sort of starch was to blame as opposed to the oyster itself.

My sister and I were over the moon, revisiting this part of our childhood. But we had hyped the dishes up so much to our boyfriends that they weren’t as impressed as we had hoped. Luckily, they were enchanted with the black sticky rice with coconut milk for dessert.

We also had a crème caramel, but the rice pudding was the favourite. Oh well, they’ll have their memories and we’ll have ours.

Phnom Penh, 244 East Georgia St., Vancouver, (604) 734-8898. Open daily 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Call for reservations for large groups.