Best Cafés in Phnom Penh (2026)

Phnom Penh drinks coffee seriously — it just took the rest of the world a while to notice. Between the old Khmer street tradition of dark robusta over ice and condensed milk and a fast-maturing specialty scene, the capital now has cafés worth planning a morning around, whether you’re chasing single origins or a cool, quiet room to work through the midday heat. These are the ones that matter in 2026.

The Specialty Wave

• Feel Good Coffee — widely rated the best roastery in the country, sourcing Fairtrade organic beans from the region and pulling the city’s most precise espresso. Its flagship sits inside Factory Phnom Penh, the vast creative campus on the southern edge of town (art gallery, skate park and some of the fastest wifi in the city attached).
• Enso — the Street 240 favourite: small, sleek, armchairs you sink into, and consistently named among the city’s best cups. The natural pairing with a browse of 240’s boutiques.
• Willow and the new-wave independents — a steady stream of small, design-forward openings keeps the scene moving; follow where the local café-hoppers point their cameras and you’ll rarely be wrong.

The Institutions

• Brown Coffee — Cambodia’s homegrown answer to the global chains, founded in 2009 and now on every second corner, reliably good and ruthlessly air-conditioned. One branch transcends the category: Brown’s Vann Molyvann House, set in a restored 1966 villa by the father of New Khmer Architecture — coffee inside a piece of Cambodia’s modernist golden age, and reason enough for an architecture pilgrimage on Mao Tse Toung Boulevard.
• Java Creative Café — pouring since 2000, which makes it the grandparent of the whole scene, and still doubling as one of the city’s liveliest contemporary art spaces (the Toul Kork branch is the calm one for working).

Brunch, Health and Hideouts

• Backyard Cafe — the city’s long-running wholefood standard-bearer: organic bowls, raw desserts and serious coffee in a calm green room. The natural refuel between Tuol Sleng and the Royal Palace on a heavy sightseeing day.
• Nutty Bakery — a Russian Market–area gem baking the city’s best artisanal sandwiches (including a cricket-flour loaf, very Cambodia) with a quiet air-conditioned floor upstairs.
• Maloop — a garden café-gallery in a 1960s villa south of the centre: shaded lawn, fusion kitchen, and the feeling of having left the city without leaving it.

For the Laptop Brigade

Phnom Penh has quietly become one of Asia’s cheapest comfortable remote-work bases, and the café infrastructure shows it: Endless Café near the riverside runs 24 hours with proper outlets and no wifi surcharges; Suzie Time Café near Tuol Sleng pioneered the pay-by-time model (about $3/hour or $6/day with unlimited coffee); and Workspace by Factory turns the Feel Good campus into a full coworking setup with meeting rooms and Zoom booths. Get a local SIM with hotspot data as backup and the city is genuinely easy to work from.

Drink It Like a Local, Once

Before the flat whites, Cambodia’s daily coffee was — and mostly still is — kafe touk doh ko: strong robusta brewed through a sock filter, poured over ice and a generous layer of sweetened condensed milk, sold from street carts for well under a dollar. Have one at a market cart at least once; it’s a completely different drink from anything on a specialty menu, and on a 35-degree morning it makes perfect sense. Pairs correctly with a street food breakfast.

Building a café crawl into a capital stay? Two days covers the highlights — here’s the full 48-hour Phnom Penh plan, and where to go when coffee hour becomes cocktail hour.