Is there dog meat in Siem Reap? The short sharp answer is yes there is, even during the partial coronavirus lockdown.
I’ll get straight into this, this is not a blog about the ethics of eating dog meat. If you want to get into that check the other blog, or just stop reading now.
Three of us are currently exiled in Cambodia, 2 of us have lived in Vietnam, all three of us have lived in China, and all of us have spent heaps of time in both North, and South Korea. At some point we were going to get the flavor for sweat meat, or dog meat as it is called.
Cambodia is a great place, but to get anything done you either need to know the language, or have a “guy”. Last week I started a budding bromance with a tuk-tuk driver, so when we decided we wanted dog meat we sent out the feelers and 10 phone calls later we had our target in place.
Driver arrived and we headed off for some dog. The place was a typical Khmer street food hole in the wall type place in Krohlan Market [ផ្សារក្រឡាញ់], but with the main difference being that he only sold dog meat.
Alas two of our group didn’t want dog, and we had to head out and fine them food. We managed to find the slowest restaurant in Siem Reap, the Night Sky Pub. It was also rather expensive!
Not to be deterred we headed back to dog town where we were treated to curried dog, and BBQ dog.
It was my first time trying curried dog and it was a real revelation, with the meat melting off the bone. The BBQ dog part in my mind was a little dry and nowhere near as good as what I have had in Yanji, but overall a huge success!
Drinks were a bit limited, but Black Panther Stout (better than ABC stout), with ice of course, we do like Beer with ice.
An update to this story! So, after shared this story amongst the expats on Siem Reap it did not go down very well at all. As of a few days ago the farming and slaughter of dogs is now illegal in the province. Was it to do with our Siem Reap dog meat blog? Probably. To read more about the ban on dog meat click here.