Sparkling Cambodian
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The food’s the thing in Melbourne’s simplest Asian restaurants. Dishes are authentic, tasty and very cheap. Décor is of no concern.
There’s a second tier of Asian places, though, that want to broaden the eating-out experience – they’re more or less posh. You choose one sort or the other depending on your tastes and needs.
One of the latter that brings style to Cambodian cooking is Bopha Devi, which has had an alleged enviable reputation in its first restaurant in Yarraville. (I haven’t been there.) Now, it has opened a sister in Docklands.
Bopha Devi is a Cambodian princess, says its publicity material, the daughter of King Norodom Sihanouk. One of the partners in this place fled to Thailand in the 1970s to escape the Khmer Rouge. So Bopha Devi, the restaurant, is something of a homage to Cambodia and its royal line.
Off a sidestreet perpendicular to the water at New Quay, it’s a ground-floor walk-in place with floor-to-ceiling glass doors in alloy frames. Inside, the ambience is pure contemporary café. There are strict communal tables in dark-stained hardwood, and white walls with big mirrors. Apart from a Khmer-inspired – says the publicity – chandelier there is almost nothing in the way of decoration.
You use big classical forks, red chopsticks and big white fabric napkins. But I wasn’t so keen on most of Bopha Devi’s seating: it amounts to ranks of low square leather cuboids in pale colours – lime, moss and cream. Bench seating, which I made a beeline for, lines one wall.
Ten “little bites” lead off the list, including garlic chive rice cakes, beef skewers in a lemongrass marinade, and “prawn pucks”. Arriving with a chilli dipping sauce in a white ceramic birdbath, six pumpkin filled parcels ($8.90) were small, golden and crumpled. Crisp on the outside, they contained a delicately spiced pumpkin puree of fine consistency.
Four “k’dom” ($9.90) – a bit like oversized spring rolls – were darkly tanned and had a texturally interesting “crispy bread” envelope. Resembling the consistency of a good sausage-roll interior, their filling of chicken and crab meat was fairly bland, I felt.
More interesting was a cone of bamboo leaf out of which spilled perhaps eight small blocks of pork spare ribs “twice cooked and coated in a caramelized palm sugar sauce”. Springy and soft, their skin left rubbery, which is against today’s trend, they had good flavour but were too salty. For all that, I liked the clear caramel in which they were enveloped.
We passed on four soups (one described as a porridge) and the same number of salads. But to choose mains was difficult. They number 15 and include such things as “a mass of julienne ginger” stirfried with chicken, beef, tofu or prawns, and chargrilled chicken and onion meatballs with vermicelli, lettuce, mint leaves, cucumber, crushed nuts and fish sauce.
Classic Cambodian-style chicken and rice (bai mouan, $15.90) didn’t look much more than a pile of rice and shreds of chicken, accompanied by a birdbath of dried lime, lemon juice and garlic sauce (I discovered later). But, gee, it grew on you and was very tasty when the elements were blended.
And I could also run amok with “amok” ($24.90), a dish costing several dollars more than the average mains price. It’s a steamed-fish curry containing cream, lemongrass, turmeric and lime leaves. Accompanied by rice and fans of thin cucumber slices, it was delicious. Flavour blends were exemplary, and the serving of springy cubes of barra was generous.
A sugar banana ($9.90) chargrilled inside a thick crust of coconut shreds was excellent.
In summary
An upmarket Asian eating place, Bopha Devi offers sparkling fresh, tasty and authentic Cambodian dishes. Prices can be high compared with cheaper Asian restaurants. Its wine list is limited and representative, and fairly low mark-ups allow you to order several bottles in the high-20s and low-30s of dollars.
Food: Amok – steamed fish curry
Drink: d’Arenberg The Hermit Crab marsanne viognier $30
The feel: Contemporary cafe
Checklist
Bopha Devi
Where: 27 Rakaia Way, New Quay, Docklands
Phone: 9600 1887
Chef: Chris Ragel
Open: Noon-11pm Sun, Tues-Sat
Parking: In streets nearby or commercial car parks
Cards: MC, Visa
Seats: 70
Liquor status: Licensed
Cost: About $40 for three courses
Score: 14 out of 20