July 18th, 2014
So I’m forced to talk about food I guess
….Only because I haven’t done anything noteworthy enough else to blog about, but we always have to eat right? So our intentions were solid yesterday when we made plans to go back to the Rusty Keyhole for ribs. We got ourselves down there by 6:40pm and would you believe that it was too late for ribs. They were sold out! They must get a lot of folks who come just for ribs, because as we walked in and the girl handed us menus, she straight up said “no pork” I was like “pardon?” And she opened the menu, pointed to the ribs and said “all gone”. So that was that. We were out of luck for the night on the famous Rusty Keyhole ribs. We decided to try our luck elsewhere….so we wandered off to see what we could find. Some folks we met at the hotel from Nethelands (I think) told us about a place called Captain Chims where they said they had something called red soup. Not sure if that was actually what it was called or that was their description of it. We has a rough idea of where this place was, so we set off to find it. We wandered up and down several streets with no luck. 😩
So, at this point we were open to whatever, Cambodian Food, Western food, European food, any food. We had seen a place called Old Irish Pub (I think) and it caught our eye again. It was an old “half in the pail” (Troy said he had a whiskey nose) guy with a sawed in half oil barrel grill set up on the sidewalk in front of a very small pub. He had a whiteboard propped up in front with cheeseburger, bacon cheeseburger, ribs or pulled pork on it. Looked like that was maybe the menu? We sat down and ordered burgers. Not without some small trepidation….but at this point it was $4 for a burger….might as well give it a go. We could always go next door for a happy pizza if we needed to. (Whatever that is).
As is our way we end up chatting with the guy, he is 60 years old, from Texas, been in Cambodia 2 years, Kampot 7 months. Lived all over the place (out of the states for 16 years). He has an arrangement with the pub owner where he can serve food and get 50 cent draft beer and he does his best to bring customers into the pub. The pub has no kitchen, so this seems like a good working relationship. Anyway, he was a chatterbox and we learned all about what is involved in retiring to Cambodia. Certainly seems way easier than retiring to Thailand, but let’s be honest, Cambodia isn’t Thailand now is it? The part of this story that amazes me is what a small world it is. When we told the dude we were from “Seattle” (so much easier than trying to explain Woodinville) he said (and this is no word of a lie) “Seattle huh, Oh I spent about 4 months in a town close to there called Bothell”. So it made it a lot easier then to say….Ha we actually love in Woodinville….he knew right where that was. Such a small world to run into someone like that here in this tiny little Cambodian town.
The burgers were fantastic BTW there were fresh fried potatoes and veggies served along with the burger which was delicious in its own right. He buys fresh ground beef from some Muslim lady and seasons it himself. So was great 😋😋 can’t believe I forgot to take a picture, but by the time it came I was so hungry and delighted I just flew into it.
We came home happy happy and then watched a movie in our room…..
This morning, the rain and wind (SO much WIND) was pretty much solid all morning and into the afternoon. This is the road that runs in front of our hotel that we have to walk 60 metres on before we get to the paved road.
The soil is so red….
By 2 pm we were ready to venture out. Thinking we needed to get to the Rusty Keyhole before they sell out of ribs 😳
We walked into the place and it was about 2/3 full and every table had ribs on it! Amazing….must be like a license to print money! We ordered the ribs to share. They were very very tasty. We decided not as good as ours at home and maybe not as much of a winner as the pepperoni pizza we had at the Rusty Keyhole 2 a couple days ago. But still very good and worth the $8 (total-not each). We did start in before remembering the photo…
We ate it all up, coleslaw and everything. Pretty impressed, it was a sweet tangy sauce.
There was lemon pie on the specials menu, so we were going to go in for that, but it wasn’t ready yet 😔
So we walked over to a pie and ice cream place I found. We only got a brownie to go because we wanted to get to the Ecran Movie house. The brownie was very very good though, and I think we might just find our way back over there for pie soon. The movie house thing was a bust for today. The two $2.50 movies they had showing were of no interest to us and the $3.50 private rooms were all full. So we will have to try again another day. We could go back at 7pm, but that seems a little late….we will see. The redeeming thing about this little side trip was we found Captain Chims! It was bumpin’ so a very good sign, we will have to go there too. Good thing I booked three more nights here 😉😉
So we picked up our laundry and made our way back to the hotel, maybe there will be a movie on the TV. I did find an English movie channel last night. 😃😃
