Have you ever heard of Poat Bok? It is a dish which can be translated as Corn Salad in English. As similar to its name, Poat Bok is a dish that derived from the original Khmer street food dish “Bok Lhong” or “Papaya Salad”.

 

Beside from corn, the ingredient in Poat Bok consists of pork skin, minced pork, dried mini shrimp (Hebi), and many other variety of vegetables. As for the taste, it is quite similar to Papaya Salad as they are using the same sauce.

However, the unique thing about Poat Bok that set its difference from Papaya Salad is the corn itself. The corn in the dish contain the sweetness unlike papaya which it is more bland than corn. Just with this little difference, the taste of Poat Bok elevate what is known to to the original dish Papaya Salad because Poat Bok contains all the flavors including sweet, sour, salt, and spicy.

 

At first glance, it looks like a chaotic flavor, but instead, it balances each other out so perfectly; especially, when you bite into the corn and it pops out the sweet flavor which is like a flavor bomb that is ready to invade your mouth. However, there is a down side to this as that it is hard to grab with chopsticks. Furthermore, the proportion that the restaurant gives is too little to even fill half of your stomach.

Although Poat Bok is the main spotlight of today’s review, there are a few other dishes that are worth mentioning as well. Those dishes are Bok Lhong(Papaya Salad) , Bok Mi (Noodle Salad), and Fried chicken with sticky rice. I can say that these dishes are just as good as the corn salad from my experience. For Bok Lhong and Bok Mi, because of the same usage in sauce and other ingredients, the same is just the same excluding the main ingredient of course.

 

Whereas for the Fried chicken, it is quite juicy, and when you dip it into the special fish sauce; it combine the chicken meat’s juice with the sauce thus creating into a perfect combination. In addition, with the sticky rice as a reliever, it serves as a purpose from you getting tired of the chicken wings themselves.

 

Food review is done, here we go to the restaurant review of the house of Poat Bok. Though, the experience I received from the dish were acceptable, whereas for the services and the environment in the restaurant, I can say that it is quite bad. The staffs there sometimes just ignore you or are too slow to take orders which make you have to call them multiple times to get their attention. Furthermore, that restaurant is too cramped. Rather than building the place into a restaurant-like, they just put the tables and chairs all of places which makes us hard to walk through and don’t feel really comfortable when sitting there. In short, their location is a really disadvantage for their business.

 

Overall, if you really want to know the taste of the corn salad or Poat Bok, you just have to try it out yourself. Though you might want to try other dishes as well because they are all equally good. This is it for today, I will come back with more food review for you guys soon. Until then, see you.

 

Price range: 2000-5000 Riel/Dish

Location: Street 259, around Sonthomuk Highschool near Fun Zone KTV