Siem Reap
– where to eat
by
Koala Bar
near "Bar St"
We were looking for an English breakfast during our visit to Siem Reap in October 2006. Having done the length of Bar Street looking for somewhere suitable that we hadn't visited before, we were running out of options. Then we came across the Koala Restaurant, just up the road from the Red Piano. "The best full English breakfast in Siem Reap", its sandwich board proclaimed. "Sounds interesting," we thought, so we went in, sat down and started looking at the menu.
The breakfast menu was structured in a reasonably sensible way: Continental breakfast ($1.75) of toast or baguette plus butter and jam; American breakfast ($2.75) as the Continental, plus eggs (done any style) and bacon; English as for American, plus baked beans, fried potatoes and tomato. We noticed that tea and coffee weren't included, so ordered them separately, remembering to ask for an extra teabag each. (Lipton teabags don't contain enough tea for one to give a strong enough pot.)
As the waitress turned to take our order to the kitchen, she turned on the fan. We asked her to turn it off again (no point in having the meal blown cold, after all).
Intrigued by the presence of seasonal local fruit juices on the menu at $1.50, we ordered one each. The dominant fruit turned out to be banana. It was smooth, thick, quite tasty and very filling. Just as well, as things turned out.
Somewhat later, the tea we'd ordered appeared – but with only one bag per pot each. We asked the waitress once more if we could have two more bags. She apologised and went off to get some – but first reached over to turn on the fan. "No!" we chorused, and Kay explained that we lived in the tropics and were used to the tropical climate.
Roughly half an hour after we sat down, the meal started appearing. Rather disconcertingly, the first plate consisted of a portion of baguette and a few chips. Clearly, rather than do the conventional thing and default to toast for the English breakfast, they'd gone for the Continental option. And chips instead of fried potatoes? It didn't promise well.
The breakfast itself confirmed our fears; dry, shrivelled bacon, cheap beans and murdered eggs. One of Kay's fried eggs had been fried inedibly hard, and the other was barely any better. Dave's scrambled eggs looked more as if they'd been picked out of some Chinese stir-fry. We're not sure what happened to the tomatoes.
In a desperate attempt to salvage something from the meal, Kay asked for her baguette to be replaced by toast. We had just about given up on it when, fifteen minutes later, the waitress arrived and placed a plate at Kay's side. It contained four diagonally-cut half-slices... of white bread. Kay pointed out that she'd asked for toast. The waitress looked puzzled. "It's warm already," she said, laying the back of her finger on a slice to prove the point.
At this point we'd had enough and told the staff that what they'd served us was not an English breakfast. They told us that that was how they'd been told to serve it by the manager. We asked what nationality he was. "Australian," they replied.
The bill, when it arrived, was for the full price, even though the meal we'd been served was grossly inadequate. We paid, but left no tip and won't be going back.
Overall rating: 1 out of 5
... and that's only for the fruit shake. The service was slow, and the food was pretty miserable.
