Welcome to Chef Nak’s Culinary World Where Tradition Meets Innovation
Chef Nak (Rotanak Ros) is an award-winning Cambodian chef, author, and culinary ambassador preserving and elevating Khmer cuisine through research, storytelling, and unforgettable hospitality. Based in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, she leads a modern Cambodian culinary movement rooted in heritage, bringing royal and home recipes back into everyday conversation and onto the world stage.
She founded Chef Nak, a cultural enterprise offering private home dining experiences, immersive cooking classes, and heritage homestays where guests don’t just taste Cambodia; they understand it.
Her cookbooks include NHUM: Recipes from a Cambodian Kitchen and SAOY: Royal Cambodian Home Cuisine (Gourmand “Best of the Best” Cookbook in the World). Through her work, Chef Nak helps safeguard living culinary knowledge, honoring elders, empowering future cooks, and sharing Cambodia’s identity through food, with warmth and pride.
About Chef Nak
-
Chef Nak exists to protect and elevate Cambodia’s living culinary heritage—royal, regional, and everyday home cooking—so it can be understood, celebrated, and carried forward. We believe food is culture, memory, and identity, and every experience we host is designed to connect guests to Cambodia with warmth and respect.
-
At Chef Nak, Cambodian cuisine is treated as a living cultural practice, not a museum artifact. Our approach begins with deep respect for heritage, but it does not stop there. We preserve by practicing, develop by understanding, and promote by sharing with meaning.
Cook with memory, research with care, innovate with restraint, and share with heart.
-
Chef Nak is a cultural culinary platform dedicated to preserving and evolving Cambodian cuisine through living practice. From cookbooks and immersive dining to education, media, and global storytelling, the work connects heritage with the present—honoring the past while ensuring Cambodian food remains relevant, respected, and alive.
-
Chef Nak is a leading voice in Cambodian cuisine, known for bringing Khmer culinary heritage to the world through books, immersive experiences, and cultural storytelling. She has been featured internationally, including in The New York Times, BBC, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, DER SPIEGEL, Financial Times, and Robb Report, and her cookbook SAOY earned top recognition at the Gourmand World Book Awards.
-
Whether you join us for a single evening or a deeper stay, we’ll welcome you as guests in our home. Come taste, learn, and feel Cambodia through food, stories, and the quiet beauty of shared hospitality—guided by Chef Nak’s award-winning culinary research, cookbooks, and cultural collaborations.