Make a Pot of Chili in Cambodia. See How Fucked Up It Is.

I wanted to make a pot of chili. Somehow, in Phnom Penh, that became a full-blown international incident involving multiple supermarkets, a translation into Khmer, imported French canned goods, an increasingly exasperated AI assistant, and one very important question: where the fuck is the ground beef?

Phnom Penh, Cambodia — October 28, 2026
By Ross Cline

Not a complicated meal. Not beef Wellington. Not a twelve-course French extravaganza. Chili. The great Canadian comfort food that requires a pot, a bit of patience, some tomatoes, kidney beans, onions, spices and, for the love of God, ground beef.

I've shopped in Canada, Germany and Taiwan. I'm accustomed to supermarkets having different selections. I'm not expecting every country to stock the exact same products. But I was spectacularly unprepared for the adventure that awaited me when I tried to make one ordinary dinner in Cambodia.

From the grocery-shopping saga

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The video companion to my unforgettable search for ground beef and cumin in Phnom Penh.

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Act I: The canned-goods success story

Things began rather well. I found two big cans of tomatoes, each 476 grams; two cans of red kidney beans; and a can of sweet corn. There were shelves and shelves of imported vegetables, complete with French labels and prices that made me read the shelf tags twice.

Even the tomato paste turned up eventually: double concentré de tomate, which is French for the exact thing I needed. Look at that. Civilization had not completely collapsed.

Act II: Apparently, ground beef is a mythical creature

Then came the meat department.

I asked for ground beef. Minced beef. Beef that has gone through a grinder. The stuff that practically has its own postcode in a Canadian supermarket.

What I could find was pork. Pork mince. Other cuts of meat. Frozen beef steaks. But not the very ordinary product I wanted.

I even had ChatGPT translate “Do you sell ground beef?” into Khmer so I could show the staff. No luck. I crossed the street to another supermarket. Still no ground beef.

My AI assistant, apparently determined to preserve my sanity at any cost, began enthusiastically suggesting ground pork instead. And I kept having to explain, with increasing emphasis, that I wanted ground fucking beef.

Why was I suddenly negotiating the main ingredient in my own dinner? If I wanted pork chili, I'd have asked for pork chili.

Act III: The cumin conspiracy

And then there was cumin.

One of the basic spices that gives chili its familiar earthy flavour. We're not talking about some mysterious herb found only on the north side of a Himalayan mountain during a full moon. We're talking about ground cumin.

Two supermarkets. No ground cumin.

Here's the part that just about finished me: I could find imported canned Guinness. Yes, Guinness. Someone had managed to get Irish stout shipped across the world and onto a shelf in Phnom Penh. But a humble little packet of ground cumin? Apparently that was asking for the moon.

Imagine the supply-chain meeting. “Irish beer? Absolutely. French tomatoes? Of course. Several varieties of European cheese? Bring them in. Ground cumin? Good heavens, no. Let's not get carried away.”

At some point, the entire exercise stopped being grocery shopping and became performance art.

Act IV: Thank God there was cheese

I did at least find a magnificent assortment of cheese: shredded blends, Emmental, Gouda, and enough other imported dairy products to make a person feel briefly optimistic again.

Cheese, after all, is one of the great comforts of life. And a good handful of melted cheese on top of chili is practically a moral obligation.

There is something especially absurd about standing in front of a selection of imported European cheese while still being unable to locate the beef and spice needed to cook the thing you're going to put that cheese on.

Act V: The receipt, the beer, and the surrender

By the end of the excursion, I had a shopping cart full of groceries, snacks, drinks and the makings of a chili that still didn't have its leading ingredient.

And yes, I kept the receipt. The total covers the whole shopping trip—drinks and other groceries included—so it would be dishonest to pretend the entire amount was the cost of chili. But it's a lovely souvenir of an evening that escalated from “I'll just pop out for groceries” to “perhaps I should start a diplomatic mission for minced beef.”

What bothers me isn't that Cambodia owes me a perfectly Canadian shopping experience. It doesn't. Local food traditions are different, and I'm not confusing “not on this shelf” with “not available anywhere in the country.”

What drives me crazy is the spectacular mismatch: expensive imported products everywhere, and yet something as elementary as ground beef and ground cumin can take a ridiculous amount of hunting. It is genuinely frustrating when all you want is to cook dinner at home.

Act VI: Lucky at Olympic Mall. How lucky could I possibly be?

Surely, I reasoned, if two supermarkets couldn't produce ground beef or cumin, a Lucky Supermarket in Olympic Mall—in the capital city of Cambodia, no less—would finally put an end to this nonsense.

I walked over to Lucky. Once again: no ground beef. I asked for ground cumin. The employee didn't recognize the spice and went to check with a superior. I waited. And the answer came back: no ground cumin, either.

So there it was. Another supermarket, another failure, another chapter in the apparently impossible task of making a pot of fucking chili. I'm standing in Phnom Penh, the capital, not a remote village. This wasn't a request for the rarest truffle in Europe. It was 500 grams of minced beef and a fairly ordinary spice.

I'm not saying every shop in Phnom Penh lacks these items. In fact, listings suggest some specialty butchers and supermarkets may sell them. What I'm saying is that I visited these stores, asked people directly, searched the aisles, tried translations and still came away without either ingredient. Availability on a delivery app is not the same thing as actually finding something on the shelf when you need it.

As one last act of desperation, I asked someone working at the Lucky Burger restaurant next to Lucky Supermarket if she knew where a person could buy ground beef and cumin. After the supermarket search, I thought someone at a place literally selling beef burgers might have a lead. I still came away without a usable answer. At this stage, I wasn't looking for a discount. I was looking for evidence that the words ground beef meant something in the shopping district.

And that's the question for anyone advertising Phnom Penh as a conveniently affordable place for foreigners to live: what does cheap rent matter when an ordinary Western-style dinner sends you round the city hunting ingredients, paying import prices and wondering if you should have eaten out instead? My experience is one evening, not a scientific survey. But it's an evening I won't forget.

The economics of a very expensive non-dinner

Let's talk money—carefully, because this isn't some invented “$140 chili recipe.” The photographed Mini Big C receipt totals US$121.05 (486,600 Cambodian riel), and it includes drinks, snacks and other groceries, not just chili ingredients. Add the transportation and additional purchases from this increasingly ridiculous mission and, by my own estimate tonight, I've spent US$140 or more. That is the cost of my wider shopping expedition, not a claim that tomatoes, beans and spices alone cost that much.

Even putting the money aside, what price do you put on an entire evening, multiple stores, rides around the city, trying to explain ordinary ingredients to staff, and returning without the two things you set out to buy? At some point, “low cost of living” starts to sound rather less impressive when your time and sanity are being spent this way.

And yes, I know that a Cambodian family making Cambodian food would shop differently. That's part of the point. For a foreigner attracted by the promise of an affordable, convenient life here, finding familiar ingredients can involve a surprising combination of imported-product prices, specialty shopping, and a fair amount of running around. It is an experience worth describing without pretending it tells the whole story of a country.

I'm not asking for a country to rearrange its cuisine for me. I'm asking why an evening in a capital-city supermarket feels like an expensive scavenger hunt. Cambodia, I wanted to make a pot of chili. Not embark on a fucking treasure hunt.

If you see a tall Canadian wandering around Phnom Penh muttering “ground beef” and “cumin” at refrigerated shelves, be kind. He probably just wants his dinner.

Tonight's score: several supermarkets, one very long receipt, no ground beef, no ground cumin—and still no pot of chili.

Ross Cline is a Canadian educator, writer and longtime resident of Asia. This is a personal account of one spectacularly frustrating shopping trip in Phnom Penh, not a claim about every grocery store or every person in Cambodia.