CHEF CHANTHY YEN
Chanthy Yen is an award-winning Cambodian-Canadian chef, restaurateur, and the winner of Top Chef Canada Season 11, where he became the competition’s first queer and first Southeast Asian champion. His career has taken him through internationally acclaimed kitchens, including Mugaritz in Spain and Ferran Adrià’s Bullipedia research centre, before leading restaurants and culinary concepts across Montreal and Vancouver. He also served as the first openly queer and first BIPOC personal chef to a Canadian Prime Minister, working for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family.
Raised in Canada by a family who fled Cambodia amid war and upheaval, Chanthy’s cooking is deeply rooted in memory, resilience, and the Cambodian traditions passed down by his grandmother. His work has increasingly become a way of reclaiming and celebrating that heritage. In 2026, he opened Touk in Vancouver, a contemporary Cambodian restaurant inspired by the flavours of his childhood and the stories of his family.
In Feeding the Diaspora, Chanthy joins Katie Prasad-Keough to explore his Cambodian heritage, his family’s journey to Canada, and the histories carried by generations shaped by displacement and genocide. Their conversation opens into a wider exploration of grief, death, resilience, and the cultural rituals through which we remember those we have lost.
“While working under Jefferson Alvarez, the talented Veneuzuelen-Brazilian chef, sent me to Spain to work at the number 5 restaurant in the world — Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.”
“Water has memory, it goes back thousands of years. These are the stories we have, that the ocean has memory.
There’s the idea of gangamata, which in Hindi is the mother ocean. There’s something so nurturing about that.”