We’ve all got that story about that little roadside place we found on holidays, where you’d get a whole barbecued chicken wrapped in a lotus leaf that you would eat down by the river. But instead of boring everyone to death with tales of this glorious chook, Sophia Thach and Lillia McCabe simply recreated it on the menu of Kingdom of Rice, the Cambodian pop-up inside the drive-through bottle shop behind the Tennyson Hotel in Mascot.
The prior tennant was Mr Liquors Dirty Italian Disco, an Italian pasta party run by the Pinbone Crew, and in many ways the spirit of that neon-lit spaghetti junction lives on. There are still mirror balls hanging from the ceiling, and there’s still the gentle fluorescent glow of the walk-in booze fridge beckoning you to select a bottle of something naturalish, juicy and delicious to go with dinner. But up at the bar they’re mixing a pandan Piña Colada, cracking the tops off fresh coconuts and smashing together mango and citrus with a lug of gin for a holiday fruit shake.
You will never look at a pub pepper sauce the same way after you’ve tried tender slices of flank steak doused in a Cambodian pepper sauce starring five kinds of Kampot pepper – fresh, dried, in all colours – plus ginger, garlic, black vinegar and dark soy sauce. It’s an umami wave that just keeps on rolling. The same pepper also takes a starring role in a simple plate of pippies dressed in lime and garlic.
Cambodian cuisine bears the hallmarks of many of its South East Asian neighbours in the use of lemongrass, ginger, garlic, galangal and citrus, but here they’re using prahok, an intense fermented fish paste that was brought back to Sydney from McCabe and Thach’s three-week snack-finding mission. The kroeung paste that makes the turmeric fried rice such a stand out they make in house from galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime, turmeric, garlic and ginger.
Some things will seem familiar, like that barbecue chicken and skewers of caramelised pork that you build into your own banh mi, but other dishes strike out for lesser-known territory, like a little plastic dish of corn kernels punctuated with dried shrimp and garlic chives (sweet and fishy, but still good), and a whole eggplant, smoked and skinned and melded with chicken mince for soft comfort that is somewhere between a hot babaganoush and a casserole.
Following on from Mr Liquors was always going to be a tall ask, but the combined efforts of ACME’s Cam Fairbairn and Mitch Orr, with McCabe in the kitchen and Thach on venue manager duties, has produced something distinctly its own, without sacrificing what made the whole idea of dining in a disused bottle-o fun in the first place. And like Mr Liquors, Kingdom of Rice is only going to be open for six months, so the clock is already ticking to see how many times you can eat the barbecued chicken that tastes like it did at that little market stall outside Siem Reap.