Elephant Walk

Elephant Walk is an odd sort of creature – a Cambodian restaurant in the middle of Boston, and now, it seems, in Cambridge. I’d never had Cambodian before, actually. Indian, certainly. One can hardly survive more than a month or so in Britain without becoming acquainted with the multitudinous pleasure that is the bog standard British curry. The usual kinds of Chinese I know well enough. Thai and Vietnamese, furthermore, have thankfully become more popular in the last few years, and I’ve been merrily plowing that particular furrow of culinary innovation. I’ve even had a good go at Ethiopian, folding the sponge like flat bread messily around the spicy African conglomeration. But Cambodian I’ve never done, so Elephant Walk represented an interested culinary diversion for me.

I don’t really know how to describe the cuisine, having tested it once now. The best I can do, I think, is to command the reader to imagine a mix of Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese, all lightened with French sophistication, rather like you lighten a cake mix with egg whites or tomato sauce with cream. Or perhaps the cuisine is actually French, exotified by Asian influences? You can’t really tell at Elephant Walk, a fact which adds to the restaurant’s considerable charm. This sophisticated conundrum was made particularly evident by the dessert JCA and I shared, which turned out to be a crème caramel made exceptional by its completely unexpected (and equally unfamiliar) pandan leaf flavouring, which managed to be both sweet and yet slightly radicchio bitter in the end.

The starters and main courses were perhaps more exotic in their conception, but still retained a subtlety sometimes missing from their East Asian counterparts. JCA had an interesting looking chicken curry, for example, which I was able moderately pilfer. What made it different, I thought, since the Indians do a good job with tomato based curries as well, was the sharp tang of lime and lively spice softened by rather unexpected shards of pineapple. It’s that kind of light touch that differentiates EW from Vietnamese cuisine, under which Fodor’s Boston had erroneously listed the restaurant. As for my dish, I think a lot can be said for a restaurant on the basis of its basic meat dishes, and my evocatively named Loc Lac, seared “lightly” in a soy and black pepper mixture, did the restaurant proud.

Oh, and a final note- get Naiting , the ground pork stew simmered with garlic and coconut milk, as a starter, and save the quite good French bread they bring you to sop the last dregs of it up with. There just isn’t enough of the accompanying crispy jasmine rice, and in any case, why feel any compulsion to use a tiny bit of rice to mop up mounds of stew, or even to leave some of the sweet concoction in the bowl? Spare yourself the heartache- hoard the bread.