To eat Chanthy Yen’s food is to get to know him.  

His creativity is folded into every bite of his Borbor: a creamy, rich, and warming rice porridge similar to congee that is mixed with squid, spot prawns, and kampot pepper foam. His kindness is tasted in his Prawn Nantua: fresh grilled prawns are served on a bed of delicate and layered red curry nantua with crunchy chunks of puffed rice. His ambition is there in his Fraser Valley Tomahawk: a juicy and moist Frenched pork chop that is paired with addictingly delicious mole and zesty watercress salad. His tenderness is all over his Guava Cake: soft morsels of bouncy dough are plated amongst candied orange cubes and burnt marshmallow ganache. 

Photo by courtesy of Touk.

Throughout every dish, the through-line is Yen’s Cambodian heritage. At his new restaurant Touk, which opened in downtown Vancouver in December 2025, the Top Chef Canada season 11 winner is using his fine-dining skills to elevate and experiment with the flavours and ingredients of his culture. The results are not only delicious—they are deeply personal. 

“My goal is to move Cambodian cuisine from traditional cuisine to something different: let it grow and let it evolve,” he says. “When I think about Touk, I think about it being a journey forward and paving way for other Cambodian people to step out of their shells of serving Japanese food, Thai food, or Vietnamese food, and making space for them to promote their cuisine.” 

While often likened to Thai or Laotian cuisine, Cambodian food—also called Khmer food—is distinct and unique. Key ingredients include fresh herbs like lemongrass and basil, kroeung (a term for Cambodia’s fragrant spice and herb pastes), and prahok (a traditional fermented fish paste). At Touk, Yen takes the foundations of Khmer cuisine and expands on them, resulting in a menu that is full of depth, modernity, and vision. 

Photo courtesy of Touk.

He was born in Windsor, Ontario, after his parents immigrated from Cambodia to Canada in the 1980s. As is custom in many Cambodian families, Yen lived with and was primarily raised by his grandmother, and it was she who instilled within him a love of not only eating food, but preparing it. 

“I was basically attached to her hip,” he recalls. “It was: mortar and pestle in the morning, out in the garden by the afternoon, and cooking all throughout the day. I was always taught that my love was translated through food.” 

Still, it wasn’t until he was in his mid-twenties that he fully grasped his own potential in the kitchen, working under acclaimed Spanish chefs Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz in the Basque Country and Ferran Adrià—of El Bulli fame—at the elBullifoundation in Costa Brava. 

Photo courtesy of Touk.

“That’s when I was like, ‘Okay, this could be like a real thing; this could be a career for me,’” Yen recalls. “But it was more so out of necessity.” That necessity came from an unwavering work ethic built into him from a young age. Even during his childhood, Yen was earning his keep, whether it was working at a cantaloupe farm on the weekends or helping his family cook meals for their community celebrations. He even did a brief stint as a tiny Elvis impersonator, touring around Ontario with his uncle’s AC/DC cover band and selling bubble gum to the children in the crowd. “I was just a kid with slicked-back hair and a leather jacket,” he recalls. (He does, for what it’s worth, have excellent hair.) 

After a stint in Montreal—where he operated, among other ventures, a Cambodian noodle pop-up and a still-standing stall at Time Out Market—Yen went on to serve as a private chef for then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. After that, he landed in Vancouver, where he oversaw menus for a plant-based eatery and an Italian restaurant group. Then Top Chef Canadahappened.  

Yen made history as the first queer and South East Asian winner in the show’s tenure, and he did it his own way. “I helped other people: I stopped what I was doing and I helped pick herbs for a fellow contestant,” he recalls. “If someone needed a blender, I went and I washed dishes and I brought it to them. I went to the competition being myself; I didn’t go in competing against other people.” 

Photo courtesy of Touk.

Still, his ability to think on his feet, work with his heart, and showcase the flavours of his heritage resulted in his ultimate win. Spurred on by the success of the show, he came back to Vancouver and got to work on Touk, and variations of some of his winning dishes are now on the restaurant’s menu.  

Yen and his team can make as much as they can in-house, from fermenting their own sausages to curing their own egg yolks to making their own oyster sauces to culturing their own butter. “It’s so nice to be able to see an ingredient grown locally, transform that into a nostalgic taste of your childhood,” he says, “and then share that with the world.” 

Photo courtesy of Touk.

The room itself is tastefully modern, with high ceilings, brushed grey walls, and three large, colourful paintings that add warmth and personality. Upstairs, Yen has plans to open a snack-bar concept in the coming months, along with a chef’s auction program in which guests will be able to purchase one part of an animal—fish eyes, for example—and then watch it prepared before their eyes in an interactive spin on nose-to-tail cooking. 

It’s all part of his mission to get people talking about and, of course, actually eating Cambodian food. “I want to see Cambodian cuisine as something that is more popular,” he says. “I want it to be a topic of conversation.” 

Touk might be the only high-end Cambodian restaurant in Canada right now, but if Yen does his job, it won’t be that way for long. 

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