From Khmer440 - esp Mikado and Chez Johnny
nine phnom penh bars you can no longer drink in
29-jul-2008
if beer came naturally from wells in kampot or kratie or kandal province , dick chaney would have been sufficiently entranced to move to phnom penh long ago. in fact, he wouldn’t have even needed to export the stuff to get texan rich. can you think of another city in the world where demand for the amber nectar can exceed supply to the extent that during this year’s khmer new year festival we almost ran out of beer?
so given that persuading the average expatriate urbanite to drink vast quantities of beer involves no marketing genius whatsoever, the number of bars that have gone to the wall over the years has been somewhat surprising.
none of these bars listed below are in robust good health. in fact, they’re all long gone and whilst some committed voluntary euthanasia, others definitely had their suicides assisted.
apocalypse now
classy chicks, cheap drinks and a level pool table were just three things this bar didn’t have during its notably peripatetic existence travelling to and fro along st 63 and thereabouts.
on entering the darkened room, one would be greeted by [url=http://isgprohibitedwords.info?CodeWord=CodeWord109][CodeWord109][/url]-coloured floor tiles, a wonky pool table and a number of unhappy looking vietnamese girls rep001tered about the moth eaten sofas or busily engaged in pampering, petting, smoothing, and smooching the battle-hardened *****mongers, silver swingers and other non-functioning and indigent expat inhabitants of the city who were dumped on stools next to a plywood bar.
presiding over this was a wheezy and degenerate pastis guzzling owner looking every inch the sleazy french pimp. he was a titan amongst bar owners (but only if we drop the last two letters) and a typical story involved an acquaintance of mine buying the man a beer so as to practise his french – and then being charged for a $3.50 ladydrink.
rumour had it that punters who couldn’t afford to shell out $5 for a trip to the short time room received the answer, ‘you do me in the toilet.’
all this combined to leave a desolate impression reeking of low end commercial sex and stale flatulence.
reason closed? the owner was sent to jail for trafficking
tom’s irish bar
close to the sihanouk/ st 63 junction, tom’s was a highly agreeable corner bar with a terrace that managed to catch a late afternoon through wind and resembled one those irish theme pubs to be found everywhere in the uk - except that it was thousands of miles away in the tropics.
the walls were adorned with camán’s, dusty sepia photographs from gaelic football matches gone by and other assorted irish nick-nacks. a couple of genial hounds had the run of the place and the cheery owner was usually in attendance.
tom’s would be alien territory for the new breed of snobby, young trustafarian ngo types, yet an older breed of ngo workers were this bar’s core clientèle - people who arrived in cambodia when it wasn’t such a sexy and fashionable travel venue of choice for twenty-something vultures with sociology degrees.
reason closed? tom passed away.
george’s nightclub and kebab house
owned by a lebanese chap (‘choose wisely my friend but the fat one is mine’) this proposed behemoth of a bar sat astride the wat phnom traffic circle (these days the haunt of ladyboys and not much else).
intriguingly george’s tried to go head to head with the heart for the elusive late night freelance dancing ladies custom and this high risk strategy actually worked during that time the heart was closed for renovations.
whilst everything was going to plan there would often be a multitude of steel panther suvs crouching outside, and inside one would find wealthy khmer men yakking nonsense while slurping jumbo jugs of angkor beer, local manikin dusky disco dollies cavorting around poles and lots of old white blokes watching the disco dollies, jaws agape.
yet even then, one had the feeling the george was getting a little over-extended by ill-advisedly spending the gnp of laos on the world’s most expensive juicer and not much less on importing a state of the art kebab machine that for some reason wouldn’t work in cambodia
and then the heart reopened and george saw the freelance dancing ladies return en masse. rule one of owning a nightclub is this. the western guys just go where the khmer girls are no matter how dangerous the venue, no matter how rotten the music is and no matter how overpriced the drinks are. and the khmer girls went back to the heart.
towards the end, george’s succumbed to the baleful embrace of failure and was deserted by the paying public. whatever the opposite of a purple patch is, this bar had it. in fact, sam campbell’s life story performed naked on ice would have attracted more customers.
reason for closure? the heart reopened.
chez johnny
‘avec chauffer’ read the ad in the press for this french owned bar on st 108. avec cock out too, customers discovered to their horror when the notoriously exhibitionist owner (johnny) came into view, trousers all too often dragging around his ankles.
he wasn’t the healthiest of specimens was johnny, which was hardly surprising considering he gave the impression of subsisting solely on cheap whiskey, sex, drugs and whatever he found when he woke up face down on the floor the next day.
he was laying flat on the bar one night and someone asked me if he was paralytic. i didn’t have a clue. that’s what he always looked like at 11pm having lost his daily duel with the whisky bottle.
however, who said that the age of chivalry was dead? how could it be when johnny was always willing to lend his own distressed mezzanine bedroom for $10 short time liaisons?
this tragicomic train wreck of epic proportions finally ended when the local constabulary rolled up and found numerous vietnamese ladies without the proper paperwork and more disturbingly a loaded firearm hidden under a bed.
reason for closure? owner jailed.
round the corner
a no frills ‘hole in the wall’ retro bar where the star attraction was an eski full of beer-on-ice, and where, if you stayed for a decent drinking session you’d no doubt have spent more money on your beer than the owner had spent decorating the place.
this sadly missed boozer (round the corner from the walkabout) was a shining example of the ‘old skool’ phnom penh drinking den.
it’s hard to imagine nowadays, but there was once a time when nearly all bars were like this and it’s harder still to imagine a better place to have got drunk on a weekend afternoon. in fact, one saturday afternoon i got so drunk that you could have nailed a mouse to my forehead and i wouldn't have known till the following tuesday.
reason for closure? the owner moved to afghanistan.
mikardo club
phnom penh’s long standing and notorious bastion of sleaze - and a venue known to pamper its patrons with a range of services seldom available inside other bars - finally had its door closed a couple of months ago.
this dark and tatty elephant's graveyard of bar girls, a final resting place for the raddled superannuated slappers reduced to working panty less, was to the casual eye the natural habitat of single male sex tourists nursing a lonely beer while their travelling pal was being vigorously entertained upstairs.
for above the ghoulishly dark mikado was an attached hotel, which whilst not having plywood rat hole cubicles, was slightly crap and down at heel despite the mirror ceilings which were there, apparently, to cover sophisticated camera equipment shooting footage. this footage, when transferred to vcd, later turned up at market stalls all around town allowing the owner a secondary income from phnom penh’s underground but roaring trade in diy sex tapes.
the end, when it came, was crisp, clear and categorical. the khmer owner, the raddled tarts and the waitresses in their ill-fitting kimonos were all hauled away by the police and the bar was jugulated there and then.
and with this bar’s closure, so ended the days of foreigner orientated ‘in house’ recreation bars
reason closed? a police raid leading to the owner’s imprisonment.
souvenir bar
not a place for pampered ex-pats whining about the hardships of living on $5000 a month in phnom penh but this riverside novelty bar (beer and burgers outside, a smorgasbord of tacky souvenirs inside) a block south from the fcc was beloved of english teachers (and other people who wear their cheap charlie badges with pride) seeking value for money - and no wonder when beer only cost about ten cents more per can than in the supermarket and each beer came with a free riverside view.
the only downside was the tawdry procession of invalids and glue sniffing orphans.
i’m no psychic but even two years ago i guessed that a tsunami of gentrification would sweep over the riverside. and so it came to be. souvenir bar has been discarded like an old plastic coffee cup for something newer and shinier, most probably a chi chi restaurant where most starters will set customers back more than it used to cost for a night of anchor jugs and burgers at the old place.
reason for closure? the times they are a changin’
my lien
in marked contract to nearby apocalypse now, there were no pock-marked old slappers to be found in this bar, which, to a large extent, functioned as a respectable dating agency for perky young vietnamese waitresses in search of a solvent western chap.
this ineffably homey bar, situated on a quiet, shady boueng keng kang side street was manna for the after-work expat crowd and my lien herself ran a tight ship, keeping both girls and customers firmly in line. she also thought up the excellent idea of charging $1.50 for a beer but then doling out a free one after every three drinks. all in all, the perfect place for a boeng keng kong sundowner and the food wasn’t bad either.
reason for closure? the owner sold the bar and to open a hostess bar elsewhere.
peace cafe
i seem to remember peaceman running a good bar once upon a time, although maybe i dreamt it?
of course this was before he got started bumping fists with the world, before he began bathing in bitterness, before his proneness to get punchy in public and before everything he did became news. (bad news.)
there was a time when you were more likely to find an accidentally discarded chicken nugget on the floor of his bar than a crumpled nugget of burnt tin foil, but those were they days of the peace café when he was a talented and extremely hardworking bar owner.
he was a good cook too, back when he knew a few recipes that didn’t involve heating up cocaine and baking powder to make crack, and his bar was unique in that ngo staffers rubbed shoulders with teachers who clicked glasses with tourists, flashpackers, khmers and anybody else fortunate enough to find out about this little oasis at the far end of st 63.
and who can forget the legendary peace cabarets (peaceman’s attempt to introduce phnom penh to the busking scene) with umpteen musicians shuffling around a tiny stage or for that matter the bum n draze gigs, or the movie premieres or the best quiz night in town?
let’s be candid. the peace café was a fantastic little bar which at the time of its demise deserved a state funeral and a 21 gun salute.
reason for closure? end of lease and relocation.
some of these bars are fondly missed whilst others were crap enough to make staying in the new going out, but the big question is this. if khmer 440 readers could play god, which bar would they like to bring back to life for one last night? which phoenix should rise from the flames for one beer-soaked evening only? round the corner leads the zombie pack for this writer, but what do you think?
