Pandoraspace

Madame Butterfly

On our first day at Siem Reap, we dumped our things at the Villa Siem Reap and headed for Madame Butterfly (MB), a French-Khmer-Thai-Vietnamese fine dining restaurant. Although MB is closed for lunch, the staff graciously open the place for us. To our delight, we were the only ones in the restaurant. 

The restaurant is located on the second floor of a big old two story Khmer house with a garden. The second floor of the house has a veranda and a huge room. The tables are set up along the veranda and inside the huge room the doors of which are left open so the breeze could come in. There were plants everywhere.

A petite and gracious but very imposing Khmer woman named Rady was our hostess. We called here the “Madame”. While our orders were being prepared, Madame served us each a glass of cold fresh sweetened lemon juice. This was just the thing we needed on a warm day after a long trip. As we were taking long sips of our sweet, sour and tart lemon juice, Madame served our Vietnamese spring rolls that came with a green papaya salad and a green mango salad. The sweet vinegar in the salads balanced the oiliness of the salty pork spring rolls.  Madame later served our green vegetable curry, chicken satay and two bowls of moist steaming hot white rice.  According to Madame, the ingredients of the vegetable curry vary depending on the vegetables available in the market. Our vegetable curry had potatoes, beans, red peppers and onions. The chicken satay was cooked just to the point where the meat is tender but not undercooked or bloody. We ate our curry, chicken and part of the spring rolls with moist steaming hot rice. Ah…bliss.  We were so mesmerized by the look, taste and smell of the food that we only remembered to photograph what was left of it after we ate.

   

For dessert, Padma settled for a cappuccino while I had a chocolate mousse.  My dark bitter sweet chocolate mousse came in a Chinese porcelain bowl and it looked very appetizing. The mouse was not heavy or too foamy.  It had just the right firm but smooth and creamy consistency of a perfect mousse.  More than that, it surpassed this chocoholic’s expectations.

  

Padma and I loved MB so much that we ate there again before we left Siem Reap.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 12:08 am and is filed under Palate Pleasers, People, Siem Reap, Cambodia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.