Angkor Soul, 12 Stockport Road, Marple, Stockport SK6 6BJ (0161 222 0707). Lunch £30, dinner £60, both for two
Marple, just outside Stockport, is not the kind of town in which you would expect to find a restaurant like Angkor Soul. I suspect even its chef and founder, Y Sok, would agree. Like Seoul Kimchi a couple of weeks ago, it is the product of pure happenstance – in this case the accident of love. Indeed, think of this as a companion piece to the Seoul Kimchi review: they are both restaurants in the north of England, representing the best of their cultures in a sweetly understated way.
Y Sok is Cambodian. Her family emigrated to the US in the 1970s after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. The food that her mother cooked was therefore far more than just dinner. It was an act of remembrance and belonging, even though getting hold of many of the ingredients was tough. It’s unsurprising that Y Sok began cooking young, first for picnics for the kids in the neighbourhood who would pay $2 a head. Later she followed her musician father around from gig to gig, selling snacks.
It also made sense that she would make a life in food, be it by leading cooking classes, as a private chef or by running supper clubs. That hasn’t stopped, though meeting her English husband, who collected vinyl records, meant moving to this leafy village at the point where Greater Manchester slips away into the Derbyshire hills. Two years ago she opened Angkor Soul, so named because in the basement there are boxes of 12in vinyls. If you share the habit, you can break off from lunch and head down in search of rare grooves.
I don’t have a record player. Obviously, therefore, my interest lies on the ground floor, an unshowy café decorated in shades of orange and red below what interior designers like to call the dado rail. A glance inside, at the convoys of three-wheeler baby buggies and the slightly harassed mothers of young children sitting beside them, and you’d clock it as the sort of place every high street needs. On the bar there are stacks of home-made flapjacks. Behind it there is a hissing coffee machine.
What matters is the vivid, extremely fresh Cambodian home cooking. I visit on a lunchtime when the menu is short and concise, but it’s all there. Y Sok herself says the repertoire is heavily influenced by that of neighbours Thailand and Vietnam, with a bit of French colonialism thrown in for good measure. Having never been anywhere near any of them I won’t argue. We start with plump, almost squared-off summer rolls, the translucent rice paper skins wrapped around bulky king prawns, with minced pork, rice noodles and vegetables, alongside a sweet-sour dipping sauce. These are soft pockets of loveliness which make you feel virtuous and clever for having decided to order them.
Crisp-shelled chicken wings, under a powerful, chilli-spiked sweet-savoury glaze, are a six-napkin job that have you nibbling down to the very end of the wing tip. A cabbage salad is a victory of shredding. In among the rice noodles and the carrots, the house-roasted peanuts and the crispy shallots, the cooling ballast of cucumber and the heavy waft of fresh mint, there is an invigorating hit of sweet and sour. At £6.95 it is the most expensive starter.
This being lunch time, there is a list of sandwiches which, in the Vietnamese style, are enclosed in baguettes. These become less bread than vehicles for flavour bombs. Thinly sliced steak has been marinated in a powerful lemongrass paste before being seared, then stacked inside with a chilli mayo, pickled carrots and a few other things besides. It’s the sort of sandwich you want the makings for at home, on standby for emergencies, because it will make most things better.
An order of Cambodian mee noodles brings one of those spiced broths you could get lost in. There is tamarind for the sour end of the spectrum, alongside fresh lime leaves and a rust-coloured liquor that hits you in the sinuses. Ours comes with chicken but, like everything else here, they’ll make it with beef, chicken, prawns or without meat of any kind. (Indeed, on Sundays the place has an increasingly popular vegan menu). A Cambodian kari, in our case made with beef, closely resembles a Thai massaman. The sweet, coconut-based sauce is thick and powerful; the sticky steamed rice becomes a necessary soothing presence. I mean all this admiringly.
The evening menu is longer, but not by much. I like the sound of Cambodian fried chicken, and of the coconut tamarind mussels and I’m a sucker for a proper rendang. Prices rise a little in the evening with main courses in the low teens, but given they come fully accessorised the bill will always stay low. Dessert is not a major concern, or a concern at all, but that’s OK because they have their squidgy flapjack. It does the job. All this, and a stack of old records in the basement. The restaurant lives up to its name. It has soul.
Which is all you need to know about this little diamond in Marple, so let me use my remaining words for a vaguely connected confession. Occasionally I am asked to name my guilty food pleasure and I reply that I have none. Because if I start feeling guilty about food, where do I stop? But I’ve realised that I do have one restaurant habit which is embarrassing, so I’ve decided to get it out there.
Not far from where I live in Brixton is the original Mamalan’s, a small café doing Beijing street food (there are others in Clapham, Shoreditch and Dalston). I sneak in there from time to time by myself. And I always have exactly the same thing. I don’t even look at the menu. Which, as I say, is embarrassing. I should be brave. I should be curious. Instead I’m a lousy creature of habit.
It’s always the grilled pork dumplings, that leak stock with each bite, alongside a few pickles. And then the crispy chicken wings, which seem to have Sichuan peppercorns in the batter, and which make my lips tingle and my heart sing. Plus a little bowl of chilli oil for dipping. That’s lunch done for £11, or £12.50 with a tip. God, it’s good. Is it OK if I carry on eating the same thing? It is? Thank you.
Jay’s news bites
Angkor Soul is one of only two Cambodian restaurants in the UK. For the record the other one is Lemongrass in London’s Camden Town. I haven’t been, but it’s been well reviewed by people I trust. The menu includes leek cake with dipping sauces, spring chilli chicken and king prawns in a pepper and tamarind sauce with palm sugar (lemongrass-restaurant.co.uk).
Restaurant reviews do go out of date, but few so quickly as my very positive review last month of The Straight and Narrow in Limehouse. I have been contacted by the chef, Dave Cousin, who tells me a disagreement with the management over the direction of the food means the key kitchen personnel are leaving. That review is therefore now out of date. I wish both restaurant and brigade well.
Want to make money in restaurants? Stop chasing the youth pound, because they’re skint. According to research from the NPD Group the growth area is lunch for the over 50s, with visits up 6% compared to 2008, and spend is up 12%.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
