Hi, I’m Lorraine! Hi, I’m Renaud! We are the couple behind Wild!
If you don’t see us while you are here, it probably means we are currently in our second restaurant in Phnom Penh. But don’t worry, our team will do everything they can to make your time with us enjoyable.
Many times, our guests ask us, “How did you end up here ?” so we decided to put it in words, so you can have a snapshot of our journey from Paris, to the Kingdom of Wonder!
Previous Lives
We met back in 2010 during our studies, in the west of France. Lorraine graduated specialised in communication, and I, in Revenue Management (the guys who play with your hotel and airplane rates depending on the demand, I do apologise for that).
After a few years working in our fields for a few years, mainly in France. We had very different experiences in the corporate world. Lorraine, in a top, multi awarded communication agency, was working extreme hours. I was, on my end, working for a medium sized hospitality group, managing the Revenue Management department, and doing pretty normal hours.
We both loved our jobs, but after years of countless hours for Lorraine, (“You’ve taken half day off?” when she was leaving before 8pm), and when my main projects ended, we where both on the edge of Burn out and Bore out.
At this point we started seriously questioning our utility to the society.
One Friday evening, coming in a train she almost missed Lorraine collapsed in her seat in front of me and told me:
-You know what, I want to leave everything and open a bar in a sunny place.
-Yeah, right, you’d be bored after 6 months (Big miscalculation)
And so started a joke that would lead us 2 years later to the opening in Wild-Siem Reap
From joke to project
Our restaurant in the sun was our intellectual hideaway, we ran the joke for a few years, thinking about the decoration, the cocktails, pretty much everything. It also gave me a topic to think of, or to research while I was bored at work. I would study the best countries to emigrate to, the cost of such a project etc. just as an game, to keep myself busy.
Cambodia popped up immediately, we loved the idea, and, anyways, we were not going to do it, right?
A week or so after I mentioned Cambodia as a place of interest, a couple of friends asked us if we would like to go on a holiday somewhere with us. I proposed Cambodia just because I had it in mind, and we all got excited about the idea to discover the temples of Angkor, and the beautiful islands of the south. 3 months later, we were falling in love with the Kingdom. Such a shame it was only a joke, in the 3 weeks we spent there, we felt like home.
While coming back to our Parisian lives, we almost stopped talking about this joke. We decided to get married and I was changing jobs, so we where pretty busy and had little time for this.
About 6 months later. I was realising that the company I moved to got me signing my contract by promised me things they never intended to actually give me. I was fully demotivated.
I had a (few) drink(s) with two friends who both had exciting jobs they really, really loved. As I was telling them I envied them for that, one of them told me out straight: “Come on, you’re not even 30, you’re staying in your job just for the material comfort it gives you, you’re going to die little by little without realising it“. It slapped me right in the face. He was right. Of course he was right.. I had to do something.
I came back a bit drunk at the apartment and told Lorraine (who just got back from work), “you know what, your bar in Cambodia, let’s do it.” She looked at me amused, as she understood I had a few drinks. ‘We get married as planned, and then we go. It gives us a year to work on it, so we do it properly, then we just do it. A lot of people take a year off to travel the world, we’ll do the same, only we just stay in one place, and try to open a business. If it doesn’t work we just come back, we have good CVs, we’ll find jobs.” Lorraine had stopped looking at me like I was telling jokes, she understood I was serious, I had a fair point, and we both needed changes in our lives.
Why the Spring Rolls ?
At that time, our typical Sunday diner was homemade spring rolls, and one day, while preparing it, we remembered a dish we loved to eat while on holidays on a french island in the Indian ocean, Cheese Samosas. “Hey, if we do a bar in Asia, we should do cheese Spring Rolls!”.
To us, it oddly made a lot of sense. A few weeks later, I told Lorraine “I think we could have fun on the Spring rolls, maybe like a cheeseburger Spring Roll or something“. Lorraine was not convinced at all, I had gone too far again.
Luckily, as I went home pretty much every night 2/3 hours before her, I took advantage of it to make a diner out of Rolls filled with Cheddar, Caramelised onions, and grounded beef.
Lorraine couldn’t get away, it was that or nothing. And from the first bite she LOVED it. OK, we can’t call it “cheeseburger spring roll”, but we can definitely do it. We spent the next weeks cooking all kind of rolls, fresh, fried, a new idea almost every day.