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Host rating
90 %
Last replied
22 Apr 2024
Reply rate
98.6 %
Usually responds within 9 days
Feedback
55
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Description
Hi we are Adrian (from UK) and Aya (from Cambodia) Adrian came to Cambodia 8 years ago after many years living in New York City, and fell in love with the people and place.
Aya (from Cambodia) is our head chef and baker - she is also an excellent cook of local Khmer Cuisine and would be willing to teach the basics.
We are located in PHNOM PENH (Russian Market area) the vibrant capital city working on our bakery project.
At the bakery we are currently 4 people, Adrian and three full time Khmer (Cambodian) workers including Aya, and her bakery assistant, Suji, and her cleaner and chef assistant Tavery.
All of us live and work in the building, as it has 5 floors and has many rooms.
We do not start work super early! - Breakfast is at 9am and working day starts at 10am
We have some hospitality business (10 minutes away from the bakery) where at time we may need helping hands.
Please only apply if you can stay 2 weeks or more (plan minimum 10 working days during your stay, Sundays closed)
During Work-a-way tenure volunteers will not be baking for customers (but if you like you can practice baking and have lessons on baking on your own time)
Tasks may include: Social media content creation and posting. Cleaning and preparing guest room. Help with general maintaining of our building. Outreach to community to promote our project.
Language exchange with Cambodia Staff - helping them to practice their English conversation.
We also do "recipe exchange" where you can cook the group meal, as we encourage group meals where chefs and food lovers share recipes from their diverse cultures.
Unsold bakery items are donated to local charity and all vegetable scraps are sent to another organization that teaches composting to local people. We welcome ideas on how to make our project more of a social enterprise but these are the first steps.
During dry season around once a month we join other local businesses in a Farmer's Market and food festivals when we have the opportunity.
HISTORY : OTRES BEACH - PARADISE LOST
OTRES VILLAGE
Adrian opened this bakery project in the village, in 2016. Minutes walk away from Otres Beach, near Sihanoukville.
In our first 6 years of operation we created jobs for 6 Cambodian people.
Our main business was our packaged soft baked cookies that are sold around Cambodia, these were made each morning during the high season by our Cambodian staff.
We housed and trained more than 200 international volunteers during those 6 years
Leftover unsold baked items we asked our volunteers to distribute among the local families in the Village, or to our local school, an NGO that we work with.
The area changed completely in 2019 due to huge Chinese investment in casinos, and many homes and businesses including ours, were destroyed.
After having our home and business demolished as part of a land grab, we relocated to the beach and too over over a beach-front resort together with another local business to start up the bakery again.
Unfortunately that beach front resort had a fire and burnt to the ground, destroying our bakery and all our equipment, thankfully, everyone survived.
So we re-located to Phnom Penh in 2020.
Types of help and learning opportunities
Charity Work
Creating/ Cooking family meals
Help around the house
Hospitality/Tourism
General Maintenance
Help with Computers/ Internet
Cultural exchange and learning opportunities
Visiting local NGO's to distribute excess food items.
Taking products to local school - all excess cookies etc are sent here and volunteers will visit the school
Opportunity to learn Khmer language with our staff.
How to source local products and interact with local Khmer vendors.
You can learn how to ride a scooter or motorbike as we will provide motorbike when needed.
The fundamentals of baking can also be taught. Traditional Khmer cooking classes are also available.
Help
If you love baking we let you practice your skills in our bakery oven, we can share the results in our communal meals.
we need 'People persons' to outreach and promote in the community. Please be ok with cleaning tasks.
Any chefs who would like to suggest creations to us and help feed our whole crew would be welcomed.
Help with content creation / filming recipes / editing video also needed.
Languages
Languages spoken
English: Fluent
Khmer: FluentThis host offers a language exchange
Aya wants to improve her English and share Khmer language basics. She is becoming fluent but needs accent help. Other staff have limited English but want to learn.
Accommodation
We have one shared room (or couple room) (air con) , and one private room (fan) available.
We provide 3 meals per working day. For your days off, local food is nearby and inexpensive ($1 - $2)
What else ...
We are now located in Phnom Penh City
Near Russian Market, Toul Tumpoung
Local food and transport is very inexpensive.
We have motorbikes or scooters for our volunteers to borrow free of charge
We organize group trip to the nearby places of natural or historical interest
A little more information
Internet access
Limited internet access
We have pets
We are smokers
Can host families
Can host digital nomads
This host has indicated that they love having digital nomads stay.
How many Workawayers can stay?
Two
Hours expected
5 hours a day, 5days a week
Feedback (27)
From the first minute he arrived (we were having a difficult moment !) he went straight ahead and started helping. He never needed to be told to help, he had the intuition to always be useful, he is multi talented and was a big help in… read more
It was a great cultural exchange experience as I could learn the real… read more
The room we slept in is big, and you have your own space. It does get quite hot as there’s not much ventilation. There is an electric… read more
Feedback
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Accuracy of profile:
(4.7)
Cultural exchange:
(4.6)
Communication:
(4.8)
From the first minute he arrived (we were having a difficult moment !) he went straight ahead and started helping. He never needed to be told to help, he had the intuition to always be useful, he is multi talented and was a big help in… read more
It was a great cultural exchange experience as I could learn the real… read more
The room we slept in is big, and you have your own space. It does get quite hot as there’s not much ventilation. There is an electric… read more
Adeline produced three short films abut our life here in Phnom Penh during her short stay with us.
I stayed for one month and had an amazing time. Aya, a local woman and the chef of the kitchen will teach you how to make bagels, brownies, cookies and more. You live all together above the bakery, this creates a nice vibe and you get to know the Khmer culture way much better than when you just travel around.… read more
They have joined forces with a couple other expat businesses and are starting to produce there product again and are i believe are… read more
Although it was quite low season during their stay we managed to bake and cook together quite a lot.
We enjoyed their Mexican taco night pop-up at our local beach bar and also their Brazilian traditional stew.
As well as having great culinary skills, they helped… read more
We would highly recommend them to any hosts here as they provided such help, encouragement and energy for their more than one month stay with us.
Jay focussed mainly on baking, developing new recipes and perfecting Jamaican patties, incredible rustic quiche and bagels. She… read more
We stayed for one week and mostly helped them in electricity. Michael connected all the electricity of the house to a generator, to make it easier for Kristin and Adrian during power cuts.
Bake and Bake is a great business with the best cookies ever and we enjoyed gave a bit of our time to help it!… read more
Suzanne is very pleasant and the communicator of the couple speaking perfect English she helped a lot with organizing our place in general was a great help.
They work very well as a team and Michael really worked extremely hard upgrading our… read more
These two were proficient across the spectrum from heavy lifting and hard physical labor to delicate baking of pastries!
They work well as a team and in the first week they fixed and connected a new roof drain pipe, added a roof extension, removed mud and debris from our yard as it was… read more
He was very enthusiastic at all tasks from maintenance work to customer relations. He worked well with our Cambodian staff and volunteers… read more
They welcomed me joyful, have always been super kind and gave met all the freedom i want, using their own kitchen for prepare some traditional Italian meal. Staying there was also a good way to stay in touch whit a nice international crew and for sure, taste a lot of great sweetes ;)
Good… read more
The experience was great and the best of all... the Khmer people, they are amazing! It was a good oportunity for meet local people and known how they really are :)
Also have the free choice to cook all we want was a good point, bread, pizza, sweets... delicious!!!
They are both highly professional and trained food scientists which was fantastic for us as we are always striving to improve our bakery products and we developed natural and healthy ways of extending the shelf life with their knowledge.
Outside of the… read more
Thanks for the wonderful mega pancake breakfast for the whole crew and those rolled up pancakes became a 'thing' here in Otres even still!
Baking bread and yummy sweets, cooking good food, selling the baked goods on the beach - all that was a lot of fun.
We really enjoyed meeting so many amazing people there. It quickly became like a little family for us, and we ended up staying for three weeks :)
Kristin, Adrian and Taylor are a great team, and we… read more
They took a massive load off our shoulders with their amazing work ethic. We had some fantastic family dinners here with stand out curries, that we all really enjoyed.
Both were super pleasant and low maintenance to have around, always put in the extra effort and offered very… read more
Martina and Sebastian performed above and beyond their duties.
Both in the kitchen (yummy vegetarian food, breakfast smoothie bowls, banana muffins....) and out, interacting directly with our customers on the beach and at our food cart, they excelled.
Very pleasant upbeat energy, yet down to earth and serious about their work.… read more
The… read more
Every morning we woke up with the smell of fresh cookies. After swimming in quiet beach, we had local breakfast and then the work started.
Zahra and I were mostly busy preparing muesly. I helped Adrian with designing Chinese version of… read more
They were super nice with us from the beginning. Was a really great experience learn this amazing recepies and had the option to used the typical cambodian kart to sell.
We really recomend This experience.
We also hope to see you again!
Welcome back any time Marta and Ruben, we miss you!
They both helped us bake and organize our bakery business. They were also both great at meeting customers and
interacting with the other volunteers and staff. They made a delicious asian style pineapple cake, and also Spanish tortilla. We were impressed… read more
They both surpassed our expectations.
They not only made delicious foods and deserts but also arranged and organized the kitchen flow for us.
Ania spent a lot of energy developing… read more
Their… read more
He is super polite, pleasant and easy to get along with. Tuomo was hard-working and low maintenance , we have no complaints at all! He even came back a month later to visit us!
His main tasks were motorbike repair and he repaired about 8 of our… read more
The volunteer work was created around our skill set and we were mainly left to decide upon our own schedule which suited us. During our time, Kit… read more
