There are two Battambang Cambodian Restaurants: Battambang Cambodian Restaurant I (on Cabramatta Road), & Battambang Cambodian Restaurant II (on John Street). Both Battambang Restaurants are located in the small, ethnically diverse city of Cabramatta, a suburb of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. Cabramatta is essentially a Southeast Asian leaning Village, with it's main street (John Street) lined with Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian shop, restaurants, and small family run eateries. The area is honest and authentic, and if it were not for the many signs with English translations a visitor might think they were walking down a village street in Vietnam. Eating in this dynamic Australian suburb is a real experience. I ate at Battambang Cambodian Restaurant many years ago, but I will never forget the experience. And although the place may have been given a facelift since then, luckily there is a lot of info & photos available on the web to refresh my dusty memory.
Battambang Cambodian Restaurant is clearly bigger these days, but it still has the same feel, like a former hole-in-the-wall joint, now extra successful, that offers an authentic Southeast Asian experience. It's like a Cambodian restaurant-diner where celebrities can come as well as the local taxicab drivers, all for a Homecooked Cambodian breakfast or lunch. Battambang Restaurant is super clean (unlike some hole-in-the-wall places I ate at while working on a movie in Cambodia years ago). Also, the all-Cambodian staff was extremely friendly and accommodating. Our wonderful server (probably the owner's niece) seemed genuinely happy and eager to explain every dish with pride (even though the menu had great color pictures), as well as make recommendations to us, most of which we ordered. At the time I was in Australia working as the writer & field producer for an 'Adventure-Travel & Nature Show' for Discovery Channel, so our group was pretty large. This was great, because we ordered a lot of different dishes to try and share, including some strange ones that we would not have gotten if there were only 2 of us.
There were some traditional Chinese dishes on the menu, I am assuming for the customers who were a bit trepidatious about filling their table with unfamiliar Cambodian fare alone. But for the most part, we stuck to the Cambodian dishes, just for the adventure elements. Afterall, we WERE in Australia to make an Adventure-Travel Show. Looking back, I wish that we had a couple of our cameras to record the meal. But the format of our show didn't contain a restaurant-food element (we mostly focused on Fishing, SCUBA, and Extreme Water related Sports), so the video would have just been B-Roll for the Crew. Besides, this was our day off and somehow it felt wrong to work. Now, back to the food:
Battambang Cambodian Restaurant is a breakfast & lunch place, closing at 5:30 PM. But Cambodian's aren't really "Bacon & Eggs" people, so most of the breakfast items were similar to lunch. And many of the dishes were just big bowls of piping hot noodle (similar to Pho). My favorite Cambodian Noodle Soup is translated as "Boat Noodles" because when shopping at the Cambodian jungle's many river-markets, small boats will come by with usually an old woman making this soup on a portable propane stove, which she sold to people other boats for pennies a bowl. The ones I've tried mostly have a rich and brown broth with long chewy rice-noodles and lots of meat and fresh herbs. But I think that many Cambodian Noodle Soups are considered "Boat Noodles", because nearly every Cambodian dish I've tried has been a big bowl of noodles with soup & meat, plus various toppings.
My favorite dishes at Battambang were the Egg Noodles with I think Duck, the Clear Soup with chunks of boiled Pork, the Fermented Fish in Coconut Milk Curry with Noodles, the Phenom Penh dry Garlic-Oil Noodles with Pork-Kidneys (a breakfast dish), the Crispy Whole Fried Chicken soaked in a tasty Brown Sauce: Delicious. Unusual and unexpected dishes that I liked were the Sour Banana-Flower Soup with Flat Noodles, and the Crispy Deep-Fried Beef Intestine-rings with Chili-Fish Sauce. For drinks most of us had some form of sweetened Milk-Tea, Mixed Fruit Juices, or Shved-Ice Drinks. But drinks were too difficult to share so I only tasted a few.
The thing that impresses me most about Cambodian food is it's creation of fermented & spicey dishes that are topped with nearly endless fresh raw vegetables & piles of herbs. I also got addicted to Banana Blossoms, which taste like a garden and have a texture of artichoke heart & chicken thigh. Overall Battambang offers a delicious cuisine with a diversity of flavors and textures, even though it is almost all soups, noodles & raw vegetables. Yum! read more
