Chef Chanthy Yen’s Quest to Cook for the Cambodian King
Following his 2020 pop-up Touk and first cookbook deal, Yen is now trying to realize some regal ambitions
by Valerie Silva Jan 28, 2021, 2:25pm EST

IfIf he tries hard enough, chef Chanthy Yen can still hear his grandmother’s pestle grinding against her mortar. It’s the early-morning sound of lemongrass, galangal (a close relative to ginger), makrut lime leaves, and turmeric being pounded to a sweaty pulp, the basis of a traditional Cambodian curry paste called kroeung. She’d go on to use the paste in dishes like nom banh chok, a fermented rice noodle soup, her hands beaming the gold-hued stain of her labour into the night.

Today, kroeung features prominently in Yen’s cooking, most recently appearing in plates on the menu at Touk, the now-closed Cambodian street food pop-up that Yen operated out of Old Montreal’s Parliament, the British pub-inspired restaurant and bar that hired him as executive chef months earlier. Launched in May, weeks after the virus had breached Montreal’s restaurant industry, forcing businesses to close, Touk was in many ways the type of COVID-era innovation that backed-into-the-corner restaurants were resorting to all across the city.

The pivot paid off, with sold-out nights and queues extending circuitously around the corner on summer nights. But for Yen, who’d toyed with the idea of opening a Cambodian restaurant for years, the venture was significant for reasons beyond its ability to provide a financial lifeline to the restaurant and its employees. Early in the pandemic (but, truthfully, throughout his entire life), he’d been on the receiving end of racist, anti-Asian affronts, and witnessing the momentum of recent social justice movements like Black Lives Matter galvanized his desire to embody his truth personally and professionally. “In some ways, I feel like I rode the coattails of BLM,” he says. “For all that happened last year, it was also the year where we were given the license to speak and truly be ourselves.”

Yen has worked in professional kitchens at non-Asian restaurants since he was 14, serving Italian food at a small, family-run restaurant in the Canadian border city of Windsor, Ontario, where he grew up. He went on to cook under chefs as acclaimed as Catalan legend Ferran Adrià, Andoni Luis Aduriz from two-Michelin-starred Basque restaurant Mugaritz, and the world-renowned Magnus Nilsson. In 2017, Yen moved to Montreal and opened his first restaurant, Fieldstone, whose multicultural, “New Canadian” tasting menu bounced liberally between places like Mexico, Spain, and Cambodia — before shuttering two years later.

It wasn’t until Touk, Yen’s first uncompromising attempt at popularizing Cambodian cuisine (and differentiating it from the food of neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand), that he brought ingredients like kroeung to the foreground, in dishes like somlar cari l’poeuv (pumpkin curry soup — his version uniquely blended into a silky puree) and prahok ktiss, a dipping sauce made by interlacing fermented fish and minced pork. Kroeung is also a focus in Yen’s forthcoming cookbook, Recipes From Yey, picked up by Random House’s Appetite imprint. Yen pitched the book, an ode to his grandmother (“yey” in Khmer), after launching Touk and noticing that his Cambodian cooking — inspired by hers — was resonating with Montrealers. Now, he’s planning to get the attention of Cambodian royalty.

Yen is launching a GoFundMe campaign, called “Take Me To The King,” whose aim is to raise enough money to front a trip to Cambodia, which he hopes will end with him cooking a feast for the royal family. Despite his apprenticeship under his grandmother and years of self-taught study, as a Canadian-born chef, Yen still worries that his recipes just may not be “Cambodian enough;” a royal stamp of approval, he hopes, will quell that insecurity.

“In Cambodia, the royal family is the one that has to verify every single cookbook and work with the authors to publish them, so the kingdom has always been a big part of the cuisine there,” Yen says, adding that they are also the ones responsible for defining the standard for fine dining in the country. “They call it Royal Cuisine, and it’s pretty much their version of what a Michelin-level experience should be.”

Donations from the fundraiser will also go to hiring a team of Cambodian creatives (cinematographers, photographers, writers, etc.) to document the journey for a potential second book deal. Any of the money left over from the production process will be channeled back to nonprofits in the country, and Yen is already in talks with NGOs about organizing charity events while there. “I realize this whole thing may sound a little selfish, and I kind of feel a little guilty for doing it, so I want to make sure giving back is part of it,” Yen says. “I also want bring attention to Cambodia for something other than its civil war.”
Full article: https://montreal.eater.com/2021/1/28/22 ... odian-king