From Local Delicacies to Global Delights: Chef Luu Meng’s Mission for Cambodian Food

As one of Cambodia’s leading lights in the food scene, Chef Luu Meng, founder and director of Thalias Hospitality, has been on a crusade to promote his country’s cuisine around the world. 

It’s not been easy – early in his career, the renowned Chef had no books to rely on to learn his country’s cuisine, no other Cambodian chefs to train under. To hone his craft, Chef Luu Meng had to count on his memory of his parents’ cooking, and visit kitchens in far-flung provinces to learn local ingredients and cooking techniques. 

With more chefs and culinary professionals following in his footsteps, Chef Luu Meng now has more leverage to pursue his mission. 

He believes that the local culinary industry should cast a spotlight on signature dishes, and promote them as part of the Cambodia tourism experience. We asked him to share his thoughts on local food, his signature dishes, and what he sees in Cambodia’s culinary future. 

You’ve been one of the leaders in the culinary scene in Cambodia for the last few years. You’ve seen how the culinary scene has changed over the past few years. What kind of changes have you seen since you started in the business?

When I started, people would be happy to just have a restaurant that has proper seating and serves alcohol. At the time, a lot of things were more local and not so sophisticated. In the 80s, there was not a lot of refrigeration in place, so a lot of recipes involved preserved foods, salted or pickled. 

By the early 90s the UN came and brought in food from different nations – from the U.S., Europe and all the other countries as well. So this influenced a more international way of eating in Cambodia. 

We started our business in the late 90s.By the early 2000s, people were looking authentic Cambodian food. That’s why I started researching Cambodian cuisine. I didn’t have any books to read recipes from, all I had to base my cooking on was my memory of how my parents did it. So we visited and talked to grandmas in their kitchens, and also people from the provinces when I would go and visit. 

I call it the cuisine from the garden: they are cooking with what ingredients they find there. Everybody cooks differently. For example, there’s a dish we make here called samlor korko – it’s like a stew with many types of vegetables, with green lemongrass. Either you put fish, or you put pork. And this is very popular for Cambodians. 

Today, people ask a lot more questions about their food – they want to know, more what type of fish? What type of prawn? Do they come from farms, or are they natural, from the wild? 

You have a lot of restaurants now around Cambodia. Is there a food philosophy behind the food you create? 

My business partner Mr. Arnaud Darc and myself, we are the true drivers in the company. We are making good food to serve ourselves and also for our clients. 

Our philosophy is, we respect the quality of the ingredients so that we make recipes with the right ingredient to enhance the taste, to make it more unique, whether it’s using local produce or imported. 

For the last ten, 15 years, we’ve been a proponent for Cambodian food, explaining it to the world. One thing I’m excited about is cooking without MSG, no chemical powders. We used to do that a long, long time ago, when we didn’t have any refrigerating systems. 

I’m using natural ingredients, either vegetables or fish or meat. The look and taste of my creations is more professional than what you’d expect of Khmer food. That also creates a layer of umami. 

We highlight good food from Cambodian culture, it’s important to us to to let Cambodians feel proud about the food from each of the provinces, the ingredients they promote.

In your recent Mekong Tourism Forum speech, you recommended that you identify seven signature national dishes to promote Khmer cuisine. What dishes would you consider as part of those seven?

I’ll mention just a few. For example, we do one called Nom Banh Chok, is like a rice vermicelli noodle dish. We use a river fish from the Mekong or Tonle Sap rivers. We cook it with green lemongrass and spices, and we serve with the rice noodles. So this is a dish that anyone visiting along the Mekong can enjoy.

The second thing we are working on is Prahok ktis. This is like a seasoning, we prepare it using red curry paste and cook in coconut milk. For the protein, you can put prawn, you can put pork, depending on the region where you are. And it is very appetizing to eat either with vegetables or with steamed rice.

The third one is this sour fish soup with banana heart. This dish was created from the 70s to the late 80s. You catch the fish, you cut the heart from the banana tree, and you cook a soup out of that with some herbs that you pick straight from the garden. This is a very tasty dish, so very refreshing. 

If we can do more beautiful dishes that can be signatures from the Mekong, I think, this is important. 

Countries from the rest of the Greater Mekong Sub-region have their own famous foods, like Thailand. I think Khmer food also has potential in terms of promoting Cambodia as a tourist destination. How do you think Cambodian food should be used to help promote Cambodia as a tourist destination?

In the last two days, I was judging a cooking competition on the national level. So I want to do more of this, to find a signature dish for us to promote through the Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Culture. 

The latest competition featured amok fish, it’s a steamed fish fillet with spices and coconut milk. It’s a signature dish where every guest, either foreign or resident, they must try. It’s something that people feel proud about.

How do you feel that government bodies like the Ministry of Tourism help you help support Khmer food more?

The Ministry of Tourism already has so many topics in their agenda. We would love to work with the Ministry of Tourism to promote and focus on gastronomy tourism. We’d love to have a dynamic team to promote this gastronomy tourism. It would also be smart for the private sector and the tourism ministry to sit down together and plan, to create the best solution for everyone.

I think we should also talk about food safety awareness – especially in the areas where there are lots of street food vendors. What efforts are being made to promote food safety awareness for street food vendors in Cambodia?

Some work has been started from the Ministry of Tourism about sanitation. The next step we need to have right now is the private sector working with the Cambodia Restaurant Association to teach food safety, using global ISO standards or something similar. Now we’re just starting this in the private sector, starting to do the work. 

It will be nice to have a government team promote rules and regulations, and also to educate street vendors on what is good to do, what to avoid. And I’m sure this will take time because we need a lot of effort from government offices like the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Health to work together. 

As a chef, you are very hands-on in terms of training up-and-coming professionals in your restaurants. Do you feel that young Khmer now entering the tourism business are getting the right training? What efforts should be made to improve the training that’s being given to young Cambodian citizens entering the tourism industry in general?

Most of them learn by on-the-job training. We have six or seven nonprofit organizations, culinary schools, and some of them are teaching beginners. In the tourism private sector, we have a school called Academy of Culinary Arts Cambodia. This is a school where we teach more than 200 young Cambodians to start to cook

This is where they get trained in the important basics, within a two year diploma course. This is very important for Mekong countries, not just in Cambodia, to get consistent training for young talent, to be able to grow the base and let them be creative in the future. 

The school is a long term investment for the country, that government and private sector work together to promote. 

Do you have difficulty finding people in the first place? Do you find that that there’s less candidates than than you wish you were there?

Finding staff, we are still able to find them. But people who come already with the right skills, even basic skills, that is difficult to find. This is not an easy job; it takes a lot of time and work to learn how to behave and gain skills. 

In your opinion, what can be done to ensure that the that the culinary scene in Cambodia thrives in the future, and becomes globally known outside your country’s borders?

We need to do more to educate. We need to create an event to celebrate our signature dishes. And we need to communicate about how good the signature dishes are. By doing that, it’s going to create interest for the people who love to take part in that. 

More than just the event, every restaurant should serve those dishes. We should get the media to cover those dishes. 

I think this is important, for Cambodian cuisine to to be shared in the country, for Cambodian food to represent us in the world, that we can share to people who visit. If they can’t come to Cambodia, they lose out on this experience! So that’s the next vision for us. 

For more on Chef Luu Meng’s work, visit Thalias Hospitality Group’s website here.