How a Chef’s Homestay Close to Phnom Penh Is Preserving Cambodia’s Culinary Heritage

Most individuals wrestle to explain Cambodian cooking. Chef Rotanak Ros begins by saying what it’s not.

“Cambodian delicacies just isn’t survival meals,” the 39-year-old Ros informed me. Popularly referred to as “Chef Nak,” the movie star chef is an brisk advocate of Cambodian, or Khmer, delicacies. She collaborates with the workers at Brasserie Louis at Rosewood Phnom Penh, within the Cambodian capital, and companions with the lodge to supply epicurean experiences (non-public cooking lessons, market excursions, and food-focused homestays) in her hometown of Prek Loung, a 40-minute drive away. 

Ros has additionally revealed two cookbooks that delve into a few of Cambodia’s most iconic dishes. As a part of her analysis, she spent 19 years crisscrossing her nation, coaxing villagers to share recipes for half-forgotten dishes. She fears that until work like hers continues, Khmer meals traditions will probably be misplaced over the approaching generations. 

Cambodian delicacies usually incorporates rice, fish, soups, loads of spices, and contemporary produce. However Ros is fast to level out that these fluctuate vastly relying on the place you might be. “Khmer meals is regional, seasonal, and really customized,” she mentioned.

Ros’s mission to reinvigorate Khmer eating stems from her nation’s poisoned previous. Within the late Nineteen Seventies, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — practically 1 / 4 of the nation’s inhabitants — died by means of mass violence, hunger, and illness underneath the novel communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. As the federal government eradicated non-public property and meals grew to become scarce, rice gruel grew to become a staple and other people started consuming bugs, bats, and even toxic fruits. 

“Large, complicated dishes have been lowered all the way down to no matter components you possibly can discover to outlive,” mentioned Ros, whose sunny demeanor and signature spherical glasses conceal a grit that developed from an impoverished childhood. She was born 5 years after the Khmer Rouge regime led to 1979. “We misplaced the bottom to carry on to, the roots of who we have been. After that, for those who requested individuals what Cambodian meals was, they may identify solely 5 dishes at most.”

The load of that historical past felt worlds away after I arrived at Ros’s homestay after crossing the Mekong River’s ocher currents outdoors Phnom Penh. The grounds have been lush, with a big pool framed by palm bushes that beckoned within the afternoon warmth. Ros and her husband, Sarin Chhuon, purchased the property in late 2018 as a rustic getaway; over time, it has grown from a easy farm patch into an Edenic compound. Friends keep in two 100-year-old wood homes relocated from the cities of Siem Reap and Battambang that native craftspeople painstakingly disassembled, cleaned, and reconstructed to Ros and Chhuon’s specs. 

As we speak, the three tastefully appointed bedrooms and open-air lounge areas are crammed with accents like hand-painted diptychs of apsaras, or celestial dancers, and Ros’s spectacular vintage assortment. Essentially the most valuable piece is a wood bowl from Chhuon’s childhood that his household introduced with them once they moved from the Kendal province to Siem Reap looking for a greater life. 

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I stayed at their dwelling for 2 nights, having fun with luxuries like air-conditioning and a non-public out of doors bathtub and bathe, in addition to considerate touches just like the tiny saucer of aromatic jasmine flowers that accompanied my ingesting water. Whereas there isn’t any spa, massages have been obtainable on demand. 

Ros’s homestay packages, that are organized for personal teams solely, vary from a five-course meal to the cooking class and multi-night keep I attended. On the primary evening, dinner was a relaxed however clever procession of Khmer dishes, which I realized have been influenced by Indian, Thai, Chinese language, Vietnamese, and French cooking (the nation was a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953). It could additionally fluctuate by area and sophistication. For instance, fish amok, a widely known coconut-based curry, would possibly contain fillets, a mix steamed in coconut shells or banana leaves, or a soup that features the entire fish. 

Khmer delicacies additionally usually contains an exuberant use of uncooked leafy greens, numerous spices, and all kinds of piquant (however hardly ever spicy) dressings. My tea kanh salad consisted of a banana-leaf cone exploding with frizzled shallots, uncooked bean sprouts, duck breast, snake beans, and peanuts, all dressed with lime juice and fish sauce and showered in chrysanthemum and water-hyacinth petals — and nice enjoyable to eat. 

“It’s crucial that we’ve got candy, bitter, and salty flavors in our salads,” mentioned Ros, who performs the position of each host and historian throughout her meals. “We by no means use oil, and there must be plenty of crunch.”

There was additionally cary trie, a platter of components designed to be combined collectively: a small crock of curry ringed by rice noodles, snakehead fish steamed in banana leaves with contemporary lemongrass and coconut cream, and little piles of julienned cucumber, bean sprouts, and banana flowers. I ate samlor muktaa, the principle dish, in a deeply appreciative silence, relishing each spoonful of the fragile pork-and-chicken consommé containing juicy prawn parcels, scallions, and tiny house-made tapioca pearls. (There’s a recipe for the soup in Ros’s cookbook Saoy.)

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The following morning, Ros and I prepped for a cooking class with a visit to Prek Loung’s small market, a 10-minute stroll away, the place we discovered feathery tamarind leaves and miniature gourds, glistening snails and writhing, just-gutted river eels. We picked up a small bag of fingertip-size freshwater shrimp, then strolled again by means of the village, stopping solely to pattern a heart-shaped, unexpectedly briny “fish mint” leaf from a vine. “Rising up, meals have been a little bit of protein and no matter was rising on the fence,” Ros informed me.

Again at her place, we stirred the shrimp into a skinny rice-flour batter earlier than gently sliding it into effervescent oil, which yielded filigreed shrimp fritters that have been the perfect I’d ever had. Ros confirmed me the right way to prepare dinner beef tenderloin with crispy shallots in cups of chaphlou leaves, which tasted just like mint, and the right way to make a standard model of fish amok, pounding aromatics resembling lemongrass, garlic, shallots, and galangal (a rootstalk associated to ginger), including shrimp paste, coconut cream, and fish sauce, then mixing in chunks of snakehead fish. Lastly, we common banana-leaf disks into little bins utilizing toothpicks, dolloped the combination inside, and positioned them in a steamer.

Whereas I blissfully misplaced monitor of the hours in Ros’s tranquil, teak-lined hideaway, an actual sense of urgency drives her work. “Possibly 100 years from now, this place could possibly be an actual museum, with a backyard crammed with edible crops,” Ros informed me. “There could be a whole lot of recipes that generations of individuals would have in any other case forgotten.” 

Rosewood Phnom Penh epicurean expertise with Chef Nak from $950 for 2 individuals, together with an in a single day keep, excursions of the chef’s dwelling and gardens and the native market, a cooking class, and limousine transfers. 

The place to Eat Khmer Delicacies in Phnom Penh

Brasserie Louis

Providing town’s loftiest views from the thirty fifth ground of Rosewood Phnom Penh, Brasserie Louis rotates a menu of 10 signature Khmer dishes.

Kravanh

Established in 2009, this bungalow-style fine-dining venue is a go-to for conventional Khmer orders, backed by a culinary crew that prioritizes utilizing components from small-batch suppliers.

Malis

Celebrated chef Luu Meng serves elevated avenue meals in three set menus or à la carte at Malis. Strive the royal mak mee, a plate of crispy fried noodles topped with slices of marinated pork.

Sombok

Chef Kimsan Pol leads an all-women crew at Sombok, an upscale restaurant on the banks of the Tonlé Sap River. A spotlight is the sombok samlor korko, which some Cambodians regard as a nationwide dish. — Samantha Falewée

 A model of this story first appeared within the August 2025 challenge of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Recipe for Success.”