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

Most people struggle to describe Cambodian cooking. Chef Rotanak Ros starts by saying what it is not.

“Cambodian cuisine is not survival food,” the 39-year-old Ros told me. Popularly known as “Chef Nak,” the celebrity chef is an energetic advocate of Cambodian, or Khmer, cuisine. She collaborates with the staff at Brasserie Louis at Rosewood Phnom Penh, in the Cambodian capital, and partners with the hotel to offer epicurean experiences (private cooking classes, market tours, and food-focused homestays) in her hometown of Prek Loung, a 40-minute drive away. 

Ros has also published two cookbooks that delve into some of Cambodia’s most iconic dishes. As part of her research, she spent 19 years crisscrossing her country, coaxing villagers to share recipes for half-forgotten dishes. She fears that unless work like hers continues, Khmer food traditions will be lost over the coming generations. 

Cambodian cuisine typically incorporates rice, fish, soups, plenty of spices, and fresh produce. But Ros is quick to point out that these vary greatly depending on where you are. “Khmer food is regional, seasonal, and very personalized,” she said.

Ros’s mission to reinvigorate Khmer dining stems from her country’s poisoned past. In the late 1970s, an estimated 2 million Cambodians — nearly a quarter of the country’s population — died through mass violence, starvation, and disease under the radical communist regime of the Khmer Rouge. As the government eliminated private property and food became scarce, rice gruel became a staple and people began eating insects, bats, and even poisonous fruits. 

“Big, complex dishes were reduced down to whatever ingredients you could find to survive,” said Ros, whose sunny demeanor and signature round glasses conceal a grit that developed from an impoverished childhood. She was born five years after the Khmer Rouge regime ended in 1979. “We lost the ground to hold on to, the roots of who we were. After that, if you asked people what Cambodian food was, they could name only five dishes at most.”

The weight of that history felt worlds away when I arrived at Ros’s homestay after crossing the Mekong River’s ocher currents outside Phnom Penh. The grounds were lush, with a large pool framed by palm trees that beckoned in the afternoon heat. Ros and her husband, Sarin Chhuon, bought the property in late 2018 as a country getaway; over the years, it has grown from a simple farm patch into an Edenic compound. Guests stay in two 100-year-old wooden houses relocated from the cities of Siem Reap and Battambang that local craftspeople painstakingly disassembled, cleaned, and reconstructed to Ros and Chhuon’s specifications. 

Today, the three tastefully appointed bedrooms and open-air lounge areas are filled with accents like hand-painted diptychs of apsaras, or celestial dancers, and Ros’s impressive antique collection. The most precious piece is a wooden bowl from Chhuon’s childhood that his family brought with them when they moved from the Kendal province to Siem Reap in search of a better life. 

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I stayed at their home for two nights, enjoying luxuries like air-conditioning and a private outdoor bathtub and shower, as well as thoughtful touches like the tiny saucer of fragrant jasmine flowers that accompanied my drinking water. While there is no spa, massages were available on demand. 

Ros’s homestay programs, which are arranged for private groups only, range from a five-course meal to the cooking class and multi-night stay I attended. On the first night, dinner was a relaxed but artful procession of Khmer dishes, which I learned have been influenced by Indian, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, and French cooking (the country was a French protectorate from 1863 to 1953). It can also vary by region and class. For example, fish amok, a well-known coconut-based curry, might involve fillets, a mixture steamed in coconut shells or banana leaves, or a soup that includes the whole fish. 

Khmer cuisine also typically includes an exuberant use of raw leafy greens, diverse spices, and a wide variety of piquant (but rarely spicy) dressings. My tea kanh salad consisted of a banana-leaf cone exploding with frizzled shallots, raw 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 great fun to eat. 

“It’s very important that we have sweet, sour, and salty flavors in our salads,” said Ros, who plays the role of both host and historian during her meals. “We never use oil, and there should be lots of crunch.”

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

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The next morning, Ros and I prepped for a cooking class with a trip to Prek Loung’s small market, a 10-minute walk away, where we found 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 back through the village, stopping only to sample a heart-shaped, unexpectedly briny “fish mint” leaf from a vine. “Growing up, meals were a bit of protein and whatever was growing on the fence,” Ros told me.

Back at her place, we stirred the shrimp into a thin rice-flour batter before gently sliding it into bubbling oil, which yielded filigreed shrimp fritters that were the best I’d ever had. Ros showed me how to cook beef tenderloin with crispy shallots in cups of chaphlou leaves, which tasted similar to mint, and how to make a common version of fish amok, pounding aromatics such as lemongrass, garlic, shallots, and galangal (a rootstalk related to ginger), adding shrimp paste, coconut cream, and fish sauce, then mixing in chunks of snakehead fish. Finally, we fashioned banana-leaf disks into little boxes using toothpicks, dolloped the mixture inside, and placed them in a steamer.

While I blissfully lost track of the hours in Ros’s tranquil, teak-lined hideaway, a real sense of urgency drives her work. “Maybe a hundred years from now, this place could be a real museum, with a garden filled with edible plants,” Ros told me. “There would be hundreds of recipes that generations of people would have otherwise forgotten.” 

Rosewood Phnom Penh epicurean experience with Chef Nak from $950 for two people, including an overnight stay, tours of the chef’s home and gardens and the local market, a cooking class, and limousine transfers. 

Where to Eat Khmer Cuisine in Phnom Penh

Brasserie Louis

Offering the city’s loftiest views from the 35th floor 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 traditional Khmer orders, backed by a culinary team that prioritizes using ingredients from small-batch suppliers.

Malis

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

Sombok

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

 A version of this story first appeared in the August 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Recipe for Success.”