Pong and Ox Club launched their collaborative “affordable luxury” menu at the Cambodian premium fast food chain’s flagship branch in Phnom Penh’s Boeung Keng Kang I last Wednesday. The new offerings combine Pong’s signature “sandger” with Ox Club’s high-end contemporary European cuisine, and use the finest Russian Oscietra caviar and fresh Italian truffles. The festive menu – only available from December 22-29 – offers the Caviar and Truffle Chicken Sandger, the Buttermilk Chicken with Truffle Sandger, and the Caviar and Truffle Chicken, as well as Buttermilk Chicken with Truffle Sauce. And the Christmas feeling continues with an exciting range of mocktails by a top-trained mixologist from Maldives, with Orange Cinnamon, Blackcurrant Kir Royale, Pomegranate Mojito, Blue Yuzu and Peach Bellini. Monirath Khim, the founder and CEO of Pong and Ox Club parent company Ubiex, said the two brands had teamed up to offer the market this unique blend of the mass market and the high end as part of the company’s ethos to continuously innovate. “Pong is a local fast food chain created to cater the mass market focusing on premium products at an affordable price, and our speciality is the ‘sandger’, which is a combination of the sandwich and the burger, and is innovative in its own right. Ox Club is a high-end contemporary fine-dining restaurant, and what makes it different is that it is offers European cuisine utilising only Japanese ingredients. You don’t usually see caviar and truffles in a fast food restaurant, so always innovating, we wanted to combine the two to put ‘affordable luxury’ on the menu. This is the first of many special collaborations between Pong and other brands – and they all will be new and exciting,” she said. Pong has expanded to six stores after only a year in operation and will have nine by February, with the fast-growing Cambodian success story now offering franchises as it plans to have 20 branches by the end of 2022.

There are plans to open an outlet in the popular Siam Paragon shopping mall, Bangkok, in February 2022. PHOTOS BY HENG CHIVOAN