Tourist-Trail Snack · Fried Crickets & Silkworms
Fried Insects (Crickets, Silkworms & Water Beetles)
Photo: Photogoddle / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
A dedicated restaurant in Siem Reap called Bugs Cafe turned the roadside snack into a sit-down tasting menu, serving tarantula alongside cricket and silkworm dishes to curious diners.
Crickets, silkworms, water beetles, and other insects are deep-fried whole with garlic and salt until crunchy, then piled into trays at night market stalls and sold by the scoop or skewer. Siem Reap's Pub Street area is one of the most visited places in the country to try them.
Why it's made this way: Insects were foraged and eaten in rural Cambodia long before the 1970s, and the food shortages of the Khmer Rouge era made them more widespread; they endured as a cheap snack that later became a tourist-trail curiosity around Angkor.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
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Photo credits.