The Best Doughnuts in the World Are in…Cambodia?

Conde Nast Traveler | 3June 2016

Courtesy Zita's Bakery

Zita’s Bakery bagels and doughnuts are available only at the Asana Old Wooden House Farmer’s Market.

Next time you're in Siem Reap, skip the red curry and pick up a bagel and a doughnut instead.

Cambodia is not where you’d expect to find good bagels. New York, yes; Montreal, yes; even Istanbul’s simits are up there. But in the stifling heat and humidity of Siem Reap—where the only temples are the thousand-year-old marvels of Angkor Wat—you wouldn’t have high hopes for finding an everything with a schmear.

And yet, they’re here. And they’re amazing.

The reason is as unexpected as the result: a bread-baking upstart from Canada named Zita Long. Long grew up in the small city of London, Ontario, the son of Cambodian refugees who’d escaped the country during the bloody reign of the Khmer Rouge. His parents eventually moved back to Siem Reap, and Zita followed ten years ago, first helping out in the kitchen of their Khmer-food restaurant and then switching to an office gig at a travel agency. “At the time I was not a foodie whatsoever, or whatever you want to call it,” he says. “I had no appreciation for high-quality food. I was the kind of person who would eat microwave food and noodles.”

All that changed with one good meal in March 2012. The highlight was dessert. “I’d never had anything like tiramisu at the time,” Long recalls. “I made the mistake of thinking that it had to do with baking,” he adds with a laugh. “So I got into baking thinking that it would lead me to making tiramisu.”

It didn’t. Several of the necessary ingredients were not available in Siem Reap so Long couldn’t make the Italian confection. But it did lead him to a new hobby—and after buying himself a toaster oven, he dove into it with enthusiasm.

A few months later, however, Long ran into a bigger challenge. “I started getting very intense rashes—so intense that I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “I don’t know if it was the baked goods, but I eliminated them from my diet and in a few days the symptoms disappeared.”

Depressed at the thought of not being able to pursue his newfound love, he researched online and found people with similar symptoms who were reporting that sourdough didn’t affect them like other carbs did. So despite the fact that he’d never tasted sourdough bread, Long began to try to bake it.

And it worked.