Touk it’s an exciting new restaurant from Chef Chanthy Yen, winner of Top Chef Canada Season 11.
I’d never had Cambodian cuisine before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We opted for the equivalent of an eight-course tasting menu so that we could try as many things as possible. What was really nice about this experience, though, was that they allowed many substitutions so that we could swap in some things that particularly appealed to us for some things we were less interested in.
The highlight of the first course was the milk bread, Pan au Lait, which was served with an amazing butter. The fancified egg rolls were pretty good, but I felt that the scallops, which were served in garlic butter on their own shells, were a bit disappointing.
The second course stand out was an Incredible Prawn dish, They were grilled and tossed in sweet red curry. The tuna crudo was less interesting.
The main course consisted of an excellent salmon with custard and coconut. But the surprise standout of the entire meal was the Fraser Valley Tomahawk, a Frenched pork chop with Cambodian mole, browned butter & watercress salad. It was an amazingly complex mole, delicious with both the pork and the watercress. I should have saved some of the bread to mop up the extra sauce.
Two desserts were included. We chose the Guava cake, which included earl grey tea flavors and a burnt marshmallow ganache. We also had the egg coffee, which was cold egg foam with a wonderful coffee gelato at its heart.
Service was friendly, efficient, and precise.
The only negative is that the restaurant was very popular at night and is comprised of mostly very hard surfaces, so the noise level was excessive. In fact, when I got home, I discovered that my watch had given me a hearing damage warning because sound levels had exceeded 90dB.
I’ll probably go back for many lunches, but I don’t know if I’ll go back for dinner on a busy night.
