Comme a la Maison, Phnom Penh

After an afternoon of ingesting creepy crawlies of various leg-count, we decided it was time for some real nosh.

Read great reviews about this French-fusion place prior to our trip, and had already listed this restaurant in our itinerary. Comme a la Maison is a short tuk-tuk ride away from the main city area.

I had the week's special: pork in beer sauce and corn-and-bacon casserole. The pork was oh-so soft, you could really just use one fork to eat. The accompanying sauce did not present any hints of beer in it.

Now the casserole of corn and bacon made this dish really interesting. I am not usually a big fan of corn but the sweetness of each kernel gave a nice dimension to the saltiness of the sauce.

On the other side of the table I had the appropriately named 'Steak'.

Well not that appropriate - it was 'steak' in the receipt but 'beef fillet' in the menu. Regardless, what I got a massive hunk of beef fillet, medium rare, glorious black pepper sauce and oh-so-much yummy double fried fries (side dish of your choosing). While not the best beef I've had in my life, the beef was soft, and the sauce promptly absorbed the juice (blood) from the beef giving that rich meaty flavour to it. So yum, for the price!

This 'mysteré' or something as they call it, vanilla ice cream with caramel and meringue. When this dish came I had to reconfirm with the waiter if they got the order right since I ordered something with meringue, and he insisted it was. Oh well!!

The vanilla ice cream for some reason in Cambodia is especially vanilla-ey, made from alotta fresh vanilla which is clearly visible. The true mystery behind this amazing dessert was when we got to the core and realized the meringue was sitting there all this time. Within the meringue was caramel @.@ Jesus christ! Inception dessert, or russian doll dessert, caramel in meringue in ice cream! Fantastic.

Ok this is less exciting - pear sorbet with dark chocolate sauce. (From the two pictures above you can see the rapid melting of ice cream - weather was THAT warm, plus we were dining alfresco). The sorbet was sufficiently pear-y and the choco sauce had a dark bitter twang. These two by themselves were great, but didn't jive too well together. It might have worked better if it was a berry sauce instead.

We had also a glass of red wine each (which was served cold - but realized it becomes room temperature in like 2.8 seconds anyway). For the wine, mains and dessert the bill came up to beUSD29.50. Can I hear you say AWESOME VALUE?!

Rating (out of 4) :