Three Days, Three Tables: The Vegetarian Menus of World Wellness Weekend
A wellness weekend is only as good as its dinners. From 18 to 20 September, the kitchens of The Wave and The Strand serve three vegetarian fine-dining menus built for the occasion — light enough to sleep on, generous enough to feel like an event, and rooted in a kitchen philosophy Kep West has held for years: balanced, local, and never copied from a book.
There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of most wellness retreats. The days are spent stretching, breathing and paddling; the evenings are spent eating something apologetic — a salad that seems to have been designed by the yoga teacher, or a buffet that undoes the morning's work by nine o'clock. Kep West Wellness has built its World Wellness Weekend to close that gap. Each of the three evenings ends at the table, and the table is treated with the same seriousness as the pier.
A Kitchen With a Point of View
The Kep West kitchen has never seen wellness as a constraint. Executive chef Chuon Sokheng — a Cambodian chef with more than two decades in the trade, from the stewarding line of a Phnom Penh grand hotel to head-chef posts across the country, and now back at the helm of the three Kep West restaurants and their bakery — has long insisted that on a coast built around wellbeing, menus have to be balanced, full of energy and adaptable to every kind of guest. His rule is simple: cook with patience and love, and treat cooking as an art form. Recipes, in his kitchen, are made to be remixed and reinvented rather than applied to the letter; the pride is in raising the quality of local cooking with what the Kep coast provides. He makes his own bread and pastries, trains his cooks in-house, and has cooked Indian and plant-based food for years alongside the crab, the bouillabaisse and the seafood barbecue The Wave is known for.
The everyday menus at The Wave and Crab & Co show what that means in practice. Both carry a proper vegetarian repertoire rather than a token page: a mushroom amok steamed in the traditional Cambodian way, an oven-baked butter pumpkin soup perfumed with lemongrass and coconut cream, a Khmer vegetable red curry, an aubergine parmigiana layered with ricotta, a caprese built on imported burrata. A kitchen that reaches for vegetables only when asked tends to produce something cautious; this one has been cooking them with conviction for a long time.
The Three Menus
Three menus, three evenings, no repetition. Each runs a full sequence — a cold starter or a soup, a main and a dessert — and each is built around Kep produce and the kitchen's standing conviction that a dish should taste of where it was grown.
Menu One
Cold Appetizer — Chef's Farmer Garden Salad. red tomatoes, cucumber, asparagus, carrots, cabbage and quinoa, with greens picked from the resort's own garden.
Main Course — Potato Gnocchi. sautéed and finished in a light tomato sauce.
Dessert — Sago in Palm Sugar. small sago pearls cooked with coconut milk and palm sugar.
Menu Two
Soup — Tomato Consommé. a baked red-tomato consommé with olive oil and a garlic crouton.
Main Course — Stuffed Bell Peppers with Lentil. filled with quinoa, black beans, corn and spices, topped with cheese and baked until tender, served with a tomato concassé and a side of sautéed spinach and garlic.
Dessert — Fruit Parfait. layered yogurt, granola and seasonal fruit, served in a glass.
Menu Three
Cold Appetizer — Meditation Salad. grilled beetroot and pumpkin with cherry tomatoes, pistachio and pesto.
Main Course — Channa Masala. chickpeas and vegetables simmered in a spiced tomato curry, with basmati rice and garlic naan.
Dessert — Chocolate Avocado Mousse. a rich, creamy mousse of ripe avocado and dark chocolate, sweetened with maple syrup.
Friday at The Wave
The weekend's first dinner follows Friday's late-afternoon Kirtan chanting and sound meditation in the garden, and it is served at The Wave, the beachfront restaurant of Knai Bang Chatt. The setting does half the work: the sea a few metres away, the light gone, the bowls still faintly in the ears. The plates are composed to sit light, so the 5:30 pier session the next morning is something to look forward to rather than survive.
Saturday and Sunday at The Strand
The two remaining dinners move to The Strand, where the pastry and bakery work of the kitchen shows at its best. Saturday follows the mangrove kayak and mangrove-planting afternoon — real food for people who have moved. Sunday closes the weekend after the community yoga class taught in Khmer, and the table becomes what it has been all along: the place where the pier faces, the deck faces and the kayak faces meet, and where a household of eighteen rooms says goodbye.
Mornings, Too
The table also opens the day. After the sunrise sessions on the pier, guests come back barefoot to the Free-Flow Breakfast at Knai Bang Chatt — fresh juices, fruit, the kitchen's own bread and pastries, and enough choice that the morning practice ends in pleasure rather than restraint.
The Practical Side
The three evening dinners are priced separately from the weekend's free community sessions, at $25 per person, so guests can build the weekend that suits them; the Free-Flow Breakfast is $15. Dietary requirements are welcome with 48 hours' notice. For a kitchen that has spent years arguing that wellbeing and appetite belong on the same plate, World Wellness Weekend is the chance to prove it three nights in a row.
World Wellness Weekend, 18–20 September 2026 — Knai Bang Chatt, The Wave and The Strand, Kep.
Book online: www.kepwest.com/world-wellness-weekend
Comments