Ran across a crazy story in today’s Asahi(print edition, so sorry there’s no link) about a restaurant in Phnom Penh that was recently shut down by local authorities for it’s Pol Pot era themed decor and cuisine!
I ran a Google search in English and managed to find a Reuters report from last week that wasn’t quite as good as the Asahi story, but good enough to suffice for the purposes of this post. From Reuters:
Faithful to the Khmer Rouge era… the waitresses are barefoot and clad in the black pyjamas and red-white scarves of the guerrillas.
Speakers blare out tunes celebrating the 1975 toppling of U.S.-backed president General Lon Nol and the walls are adorned with the baskets, hoes and spades Pol Pot hoped would power his jungle-clad south-east Asian homeland to communist prosperity.
And it gets worse… Having adapted a move that sounds like it came straight out of Robert Mugabe’s playbook (hat tip to Curzon for that one), the owners are actually plugging their cafe’s appetizing menu of “rice water and leaves” as a way to lose weight!
Recognising that many tourists might not be able to stomach such a close brush with the Killing Fields, the “Khmer Rouge Experience Cafe” is also promoting itself to those wishing to shed a few pounds.
“It’s good for me to slim down,” said Tan, a 40-year-old Malaysian visitor.
That’s even more tasteless than the Soviet-themed bar we saw in Kazakhstan.
I specifically bought one of those scarves and some wikked “Dictator Shades” while I was in Cambodia. For other holocaustic restaurants “check this out”:http://www.inch.com/~tuckerg/tuk/nazi.html.
At least the Soviet bar was for local nostalgia, not intended to be a tourist spot.