"9"^^ . . "5"^^ . . "3"^^ . "2011-03-02T00:00:00"^^ . "I had lunch at Sekong by Night with a couple of foodnik friends on its second day of business. Overall the experience was worthy of four-stars. \n\nFirst, the design - it appears to have formerly been a Mexican restaurant and an Italian eatery of sorts, and vestiges of both decors abound, though the owners have gone to great lengths to give it an Indochine feel. All around a pleasant dining atmosphere with spacious booths flanking a long table that would be suitable for a large group.\n\nThe food was great; it was like Vietnamese food's understated cousin, which I guess it technically is. The menu offered a handy guide to the meals, and often compared a dish to it's Vietnamese counterpart. I had a spring roll, which was large and delicious. The fish sauce it came with appeared to be nuoc mam, but was a little sweeter than the nuoc mam at other places around town. Katheaw is the Cambodian cousin of pho, and in presentation looks exactly like pho (vermicelli noodles in a broth with meats and vegetables); the broth, however, bore no taste resemblence to pho broth, and if anything tasted more like chicken noodle soup than pho. I opted for the Katheaw Phnom Pehn, and while I found it delicious, be aware that it is offal-heavy, and if you don't like the taste of liver, you won't like the amount they put in it. \n\nMy lunch companions' meals looked delicious, and I had a taste of one of their sandwiches. Again, the sandwich was very similar to banh mi (those French made inroads on the local Southeast Asian cuisine, I'll tell you), but featuring beef rather than pork, and heavy with the taste of lemongrass, which I'd never noticed in the banh mi I've had.\n\nI'm a junkie for Pho Thanh, but I suspect I'm going to put Sekong by Night into the rotation."^^ . . "4"^^ .