Joannès Rivière facts for kids

Joannès "Jo" Rivière is a French chef who owns restaurants and writes cookbooks. He is an expert in Cambodian cuisine. Many people see him as the top Western expert on Cambodian food.

Jo's Story

Joannès Rivière was born in Roanne, France. He grew up there. He remembers family Christmas dinners. They often had a mix of French and Southeast Asian dishes. His uncle, who worked in Cambodia in the 1970s, introduced dishes like larp. Jo learned to cook by working in his family's restaurant.

After culinary school in France, he moved to the United States. He worked as a pastry chef in Nantucket and Philadelphia for two years.

Instead of military service, Jo chose to do civic service. In August 2003, he moved to Cambodia. He volunteered at the Sala Baï Hotel and Restaurant School in Siem Reap. This school is a non-profit that helps young people learn cooking and hotel skills. Jo taught cooking and managed the restaurant there.

To help the school raise money, he wrote a Cambodian cookbook. It was called La cuisine du Cambodge avec les aprentis de Sala Bai. The book came out in 2005. It sold over 8,000 copies in France. Jo said he wasn't very interested in Cambodian cuisine at first. But working on the book made him really curious about it.

Cambodian food has changed my cooking style in many ways. The idea of mixing meat and fish, the idea of over or under cooking something on purpose, or even the idea of doing an entire meal without dairy, has changed my way of running a kitchen.

—Joannès Rivière

In 2005, Jo started working at the Hotel de la Paix's Meric. He was an executive sous-chef, which is a head chef's assistant. In 2008, an English version of his cookbook came out. It was called "Cambodian Cooking: A humanitarian project in collaboration with Act for Cambodia".

In 2010, Jo was planning to go back to France. But then he met David Thompson, a famous chef. Thompson ate at the hotel where Jo worked. He was very impressed by how Jo used local ingredients that most people didn't know about. Thompson encouraged Jo to stay in Cambodia. He told him to open his own restaurant.

Cuisine Wat Damnak: A Special Restaurant

In 2011, Joannès Rivière and his partner Carole Salmon opened Cuisine Wat Damnak. The restaurant is named after the nearby Wat Damnak pagoda. It serves Cambodian food, focusing on dishes that are not very well-known.

The restaurant changes its menu every two weeks. This way, they can use fresh ingredients that are available locally at that time.

In 2015, Cuisine Wat Damnak was named one of Asia's 50 Best Restaurants. It was the first Cambodian restaurant to make this important list. In 2016, it moved up to the 43rd spot on the list.

In 2018, Jo partnered with Nguon Vengchhay, a Cambodian expert in hotels and restaurants. In March 2021, they opened another Cuisine Wat Damnak in Phnom Penh. The original restaurant in Siem Reap had to close because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it reopened on October 1, 2022.

In 2022, both Cuisine Wat Damnak restaurants were recognized again. The online travel magazine Travel + Leisure named them the No. 2 "Best Restaurants in Cambodia" in their "Asia’s Best Awards 2022 – Best Of Cambodia" category.

Books by Joannès Rivière

• Joannès Rivière, Dominique De Bourgknecht, David Lallemand (2005). La Cuisine du Cambodge avec les apprentis de Sala Baï. Philippe Picquier Publishing ISBN: 978-2-877-30816-8
• Joannès Rivière, Dominique De Bourgknecht, David Lallemand (2008). Cambodian Cooking: A humanitarian project in collaboration with Act for Cambodia. Periplus Editions. ISBN: 978-0-794-65039-1.