Babel about to open our Family friendly and Vegan friendly restaurant

BlogPost from 3rd of May 2021

Time for an update. We have finally finished our outside area (almost), and we are very happy with the result. It actually even looks bigger, despite the fact that we have lost 5 meters of our garden. We have kept the chilled out, relaxing feel and we are constantly working on making the garden even more tropical than before.

We also made it very child friendly, with a lot of different play areas for kids.

We are very passionate about spreading the word about plastic pollution, so our toys are Eco Friendly - made of bamboo, reclaimed wood and rattan. We also have different plasticfree toys from a Cambodian local brand Beebeeandbongo - supporting a local small business. And all the vegetables, cakes, cookies, donuts and ice cream are home made.

We hope to be an inspiration for others – we really don’t need harmful plastic toys for our kids to develop, be creative and have fun.

In fact, a lot of our sustainable toys are available in our Eco shop, as we now have a new section – just for ECO KIDS!

We decided to make our restaurant completely plant based. There are many reasons for this, but our main reason is the Eco Friendly aspect of it. Going Vegan is one of the best ways to take care of the planet. More and more people realize this, and we think it is needed in this city where almost all vegan restaurants are closed.

But it sure is challenging. Simen has spend a LOT of time finding out where he can locate ingredients that we need, and we have spend quite a lot of time testing. But we were determent, and had even set a date for the opening.

Then came the lockdown. And it gave us a HUGE set back.

We lacked ingredients, staff and workers to do the final touch outside - plus we lacked TIME with two little monkey girls under 4 at home.

Lockdown situation in Cambodia:

In short: Two Chinese tourists had the “English version” of the virus when they arrived to Phnom Penh late February. They bought them self out of their quarantine hotel and went straight to a night club and spread the virus there. Cambodia went from around 400 cases of the virus and no deaths for A WHOLE YEAR, till thousands of cases and more than 30 deaths in just a couple of weeks. Phnom Penh now has hundreds and hundreds of cases every single day, and the situation in not under control, even after schools closed and weeks of curfew. Phnom Penh went into lockdown.

And shortly after, so did we (parts of Siem Reap). For those of you who knows Siem Reap, this is how Pub Street area looked like under lockdown:

We have very few cases in Siem Reap, and the lockdown has just finished. So we have just started again where we “dropped off”. But still with two little ones at home. So it sure is challenging. But we are determent - WE WILL OPEN SOON!! We will keep you posted!

AND - situation is still the same - no tourists, no income for over a year.

This is how Angkor Wat looks like now. Exactly like it did a year ago: