How to Eat Safely in Cambodia – A Footpath Feasting Guide to Safe Eating

How to eat safely in Cambodia is a concern of many travellers heading here and is something we are asked about all the time by people planning a visit. Getting sick can ruin that once in a lifetime trip to Angkor Archaeological Park. But it can ruin a whole lot more than that if you catch something really nasty.

How to eat street food safely in Cambodia is a question we often get asked, as nobody wants to get sick the day before sunrise at Angkor Wat. But there are so many different factors that can cause you to become ill after eating at a street food stall, market or restaurant, making it an issue that we often find hard to cover when writing about destinations and restaurants.

Here are some insights and thoughts on the dilemma that food and travel writers face when covering the subject, as well as lots of tips to how to eat safely in Cambodia (our home since 2013) and beyond; we were based in Vietnam and Thailand before Cambodia, spent seven years on the road before that, and lived in the Middle East for nearly a decade.

How to Eat Safely in Cambodia – A Footpath Feasting Guide to Safe Eating

Some years ago on a travel guidebook assignment in northern Italy we were driving to our next destination on our Italian Lakes road trip when Lara told me the name of the hotel we were checking into that night. It sounded familiar. Then I recalled why. A couple of weeks before our stay, the hotel in question had a serious outbreak of food poisoning amongst a group of guests, resulting in one fatality.

As it was the busy summer high season, and we were researching and writing a new guidebook, which I was also photographing, we had to book all of our hotels in advance. It was too late to change to a property we would have preferred to have been experiencing and writing about, under the circumstances.

Needless to say, the mood at the hotel was somber. The chefs were using thermometers to check the doneness of scrambled eggs at breakfast. The waiters were very suspicious of my cameras. They probably suspected we were doing a story on their food poisoning incident.

It was a dilemma trying to determine how to cover the hotel in the book we were working on. It was one of the most iconic grand hotels on the Italian Lakes, with a noble history. So was it fair on the hotel to mention the incident (“nice hotel, but avoid the food!”) or unfair on potential guests to not write about it?

A couple of incidents in Cambodia raised a similar issue for us. While it’s one thing to get sick yourself, or read reports about groups of people falling ill after a meal at one of the best restaurants in the world, it’s another to see poor food handling practices up close.

We had just arrived at a new hotel in Phnom Penh, and with deadlines looming that afternoon we decided to order some room service for lunch. Our own needs aside, we try to make a habit of ordering room service at hotels we’re writing about to see what it’s like, because travellers often tell us that they will eat in their room at least once in a stay because they’re too tired to go out.

The fresh spring rolls that arrived that day were very fresh. So fresh, in fact, that the prawns were completely raw. The ‘chef’ had forgotten to cook the prawns before preparing the rolls. I would eat raw prawns in a sushi joint in Japan or a fine dining restaurant in Italy (or cooking class in Venice), where they serve prawns uncooked in extra virgin olive oil, and where they know how to handle them. But the last place I’d eat raw prawns is Cambodia.

For an unsuspecting and unlucky guest, eating the uncooked prawns could have meant a couple of days suffering bacterial diarrhoea, or worse, contracting hepatitis A or typhoid, both distinct risks in Cambodia. One reason why you should have those pre-trip vaccinations.

A couple of weeks later, we did a popular cooking course at a local restaurant in another Cambodian city where the ‘instructor’ really had a thing about food safety – and crumbling Knorr’s chicken stock cubes into every single dish. While his obsessive use of the stock cubes was disconcerting, his admirable safety lessons were undone by the plastic container of ‘meat’ he proudly showed us.

I prefer metal containers for hygiene reasons. I also prefer to keep raw beef, pork and chicken in separate containers. Yes, he kept all three types of meat in the one container for use in both his restaurant and the cooking classes he ran with his wife each day.

If you were being generous you could say that, well, it’s all going to get cooked anyway and that any bacteria* will die when the meat is cooked to a safe temperature. (*The meats were floating in chicken juice with possible campylobacter and salmonella). But really, would you want to cook or eat in a restaurant with a kitchen that takes that unnecessary risk in the first place?

While I would never recommend a cooking course where the secret flavour ingredient is Knorr’s chicken stock, I would also never knowingly eat at a restaurant that takes such risks with food hygiene when it comes to meat storage. Nor do I want to be recommending that restaurant or cooking class.

But as food and travel writers, do we have an obligation to travellers to not only not mention these places in the stories and books we’re writing, but to also ‘out’ places that could potentially harm – or even kill – guests due to their poor food handling practices? And how do we know that places we recommend actually do have better food handling without going into the kitchen to do an inspection?

In the case of the hotel in Phnom Penh, Lara sent the spring rolls back and sent an email to the hotel owner and manager. It turned out the hotel was in between chefs and a very junior kitchen staffer had forgotten to cook the prawns. They apologised profusely and invited us to return to dine in the restaurant – when they had a new chef in place.

The cooking course instructor, however, didn’t think that there was anything wrong with his food handling practices, even after I pointed out the potential problem. It’s a popular cooking class that is recommended in guidebooks and travel forums and included on food tours. There’s no way we will be recommending it.

Since those experiences, we’ve been living in Cambodia for some years and have spent plenty of time in kitchens here, doing cooking classes, and interviewing chefs and restaurant owners, so we thought it was time we shared some advice on how to eat safely in Cambodia.

Tips For How to Eat Safely in Cambodia

These are our tips to how to eat safely in Cambodia, based on our years living in the country and covering Cambodian restaurants, Cambodian street food and Cambodian cuisine.

Be More Conservative in Cambodia

Take a lot more care in Cambodia than you would in other countries when it comes to food that you’re willing to try on the streets – hepatitis A and typhoid are not souvenirs you want to take back home.

For a number of reasons, diseases are more prevalent here, hygiene standards are generally lower, and street food stalls are not as scrupulously clean as they are in Vietnam or Thailand. Most travellers we meet have been sick at some stage of their Cambodian trip.

The Usual Southeast Asia Street Food Rules Apply

Apply the same rules to eating street food safely anywhere in the world to Cambodia. Make sure the market stall or street food stall is busy with locals. Look to see whether the cook or vendor is wearing plastic gloves. Look for a tub of dishes that appear to be getting washed in hot soapy water.

Check to see if the chopsticks are in sealed paper or plastic or if they and the cutlery are presented in a container of piping hot water. Make a note of how clean the kitchen or food preparation area looks if you can see it. All are essential in Cambodia.

Take Extra Care with Fresh Uncooked Food

You want to buy some sliced fruit from a street cart on a hot day? Sure, it’s fantastic, especially when sprinkled with salt and chilli, but is the vendor wearing gloves when cutting it or is there somewhere nearby where they appear to be washing their hands? Yes? Great.

But if he or she is also handling money, good luck. I’ll peel my own fruit, thanks. You’re better off buying fresh fruit from one of Siem Reap’s many locals markets and a US$1 peeler or paring knife if you haven’t yet mastered the art of peeling some of Southeast Asia’s more exotic fruits. Fruit sellers also often sell little bags of chilli salt.

Be Careful at the Hotel Breakfast Buffet

If you’re at a hotel or hostel with a buffet for breakfast, don’t pick up food or pieces of fruit with communal serving spoons or forks and then go and sit down and eat it with your hands. Buffets themselves are never a great idea, but sharing cutlery can be just as dangerous. Take your own cutlery from your table.

Wash Your Hands Well Before Eating

Always wash your hands well before you eat, but especially if you’ve been in the countryside, shaking hands with people, and perhaps patting (hopefully, rabies-free) dogs. Wash your hands throughly with soap for at least twenty seconds. Or use a hand sanitiser with at least 60% alcohol.

Remain Cautious in Restaurants

Don’t assume that visiting a Western-owned restaurant means you’re safe. Unless the chef is operating at the level of a restaurant like Cuisine Wat Damnak, Sugar Palm, Lum Orng Farm to Table restaurant, or some of the other best restaurants in Siem Reap, food hygiene standards might not be much better than a market food stall.

In some cases, they could be worse. Lara was in bed (and in the bathroom!) for two days after eating at a well established French restaurant in Siem Reap soon after we moved here – a restaurant that came highly recommended by local residents, including friends who worked in hospitality. Take care.

Take Care at Cooking Classes

If you’re doing a cooking course, find out if the instructors are qualified as chefs or have worked in a good restaurant or hotel kitchen, where you can expect there are procedures in place for food safety. Hopefully one where the hotel wasn’t “in-between head chefs”. You don’t want to be eating any meats that were stored together raw in the fridge, as we had to.

We recommend the outstanding cooking classes ran by the chefs who own Siem Reap’s best restaurants, such as those by chef Sothea Seng of Lum Orng Farm to Table and Mahob Khmer restaurant, and chef Mengly Mork, formerly of Pou restaurant and now helming Pinak Pou and Tompea restaurants at Maison 557, a charming B&B in Wat Bo neighbourhood.

You should also be safe booking cooking classes at good hotels and can assume that the more stars the hotel has, the higher the standards of food handling. When we first arrived in Siem Reap we did cooking classes with chefs at the Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor and Siem Reap’s Anantara, which were excellent.

Take Calculated Risks

Because I’m living in Siem Reap, in the name of research I’ll often take more risks than the average person would or should. I might just finish off that slightly undercooked roadside beef skewer, order beef carpaccio at our regular Italian restaurant, or get a beer with ice in it. But I don’t have a full day’s tour of the temples in a tuk tuk booked for the next day. Nor a plane to catch. As the saying goes, only gamble what you’re willing to lose.