Creator
Kethana Dunnet
Cambodian chef and restaurateur who founded The Sugar Palm and teaches traditional home-style Khmer cooking.
Kethana Dunnet is a Cambodian chef and restaurateur who founded The Sugar Palm, with restaurants in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh.[1][2] Her cooking is built on the traditional home-style Khmer dishes she learned from older generations and ate growing up in Phnom Penh.[3]
The Sugar Palm
Traditional Khmer cooking declined after the violence of the 1970s, and that loss led Dunnet to preserve the dishes she had learned at home.[2][3] She returned to Cambodia in 2002 and opened restaurants in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.[1] Business Jet Traveler gives the year of her return, from exile in New Zealand, as 2003.[4] The first Sugar Palm opened in Phnom Penh. For the second, in Siem Reap, she built a traditional Khmer timber house, and it opened in 2006.[4][5] She has said she wanted the restaurant to reconnect with Cambodia's prewar era.[5]
The Sugar Palm serves Cambodian salads, curries and stir-fries made with the herbs and spices of Khmer cooking.[3] Among her dishes are a sweet-and-sour pomelo salad with sliced pork, dried shrimp, silver noodles and mint, and a soufflé-like fish amok of snakehead fish curry with coconut cream, steamed in a palm leaf.[4] Dunnet has said that Cambodian food has a gentler balance and less heat than Thai food.[5] Most nights she oversees the kitchen of one of her restaurants.[3]
Teaching
Dunnet teaches cooking classes at The Sugar Palm, where visitors cook from market and farm ingredients.[4][1] She also hosts occasional classes at her farm among the rice fields of the Cambodian countryside.[3]
She has advised chefs visiting Cambodia for their television cooking programs, among them Gordon Ramsay and Luke Nguyen.[3] She taught Ramsay about Khmer cooking in 2010, while he was filming his Great Escape series, and she passed him The Sugar Palm's fish amok recipe.[4][6]
Recognition
The World's 50 Best Discovery calls Dunnet a global authority on Cambodian cuisine.[2]
Works
- Cha Traop Dot (recipe) (Recipe)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 The Sugar Palm, official site
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 The World's 50 Best Discovery, The Sugar Palm, Siem Reap
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 The Sugar Palm, Welcome (2021)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Business Jet Traveler, 12 Terrific Restaurants (March 14, 2014)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Saveur, The New Tastes of Old Siem Reap (December 15, 2015)
- ↑ Sawasdee (Thai Airways), A tasty dining guide of where to eat in Siem Reap