The advantage of a cuisine prepared in a remote place, difficult to access, is the guarantee that it will be natural. And around the Shinta Mani Wild, no supplier or store in town to stock up. What is wildly delicious for us, a different menu every day, is sometimes a little less so for the young Cambodian chef Tim Pheak who has to demonstrate perpetual inventiveness. And he succeeds!

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Partly also thanks to the organic farm created during the pandemic: hens providing fresh eggs, traditional herbs, basic vegetables and some fruit. But all this is not enough to make three meals a day for thirty people, when the lodge is full.

This is why the chief and his assistants go into the forest daily (let’s be honest, they will also get supplies from the few peasants who live around and whom the lodge has convinced to collect edible plants to sell them rather than indulge in poaching ) in order to harvest surprising fruits such as huge jackfruit, wild grapes from Burma or vegetables with fantastic names such as dragon bean, Malabar spinach or tamarind blossom.

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You and I could walk for hours past all those unnoticed edibles. But not Tim Pheak, who gives the impression of being in a supermarket, going right or left with quiet assurance, to pick this or that.

Between spicy soups where ingredients harvested earlier are harmoniously combined, fish amok stewed in a banana leaf or crispy salads with banana inflorescence, the variety of dishes surprises the palate as much as the he delights him. And for the more daring, the cook even suggests adding some grilled insects or red ants. Strongly salted, it’s very good!