Best Restaurants in Siem Reap (2026)

Siem Reap punches absurdly above its weight as a food town. A city you could walk across in an hour holds Cambodia’s most celebrated tasting menus, a wave of social-enterprise kitchens training young Khmer chefs, and street grills where dinner still costs less than a temple-day bottle of water. The trick is knowing which is which — and steering clear of the reheated tourist menus around Pub Street. Here’s where to actually eat.

Khmer Fine Dining Worth Booking Ahead

• Cuisine Wat Damnak — the restaurant that put modern Khmer cuisine on the world’s map. Chef Joannès Rivière builds short tasting menus around whatever the markets and the Tonle Sap deliver, changing every couple of weeks; expect combinations you won’t see anywhere else in the country. Dinner only, Tuesday to Saturday, and tables genuinely run out — book days ahead. Around $30–40 for the menu, remarkable at the level.
• Embassy Khmer Gastronomy — an all-female kitchen led by the Kimsan twins, serving a monthly-changing Khmer tasting menu that tracks the seasons. Polished, personal, and quietly ground-breaking in an industry still dominated by men.
• Malis Siem Reap — chef Luu Meng’s temple of “living Cambodian cuisine” and the benchmark for the classics: if you want to know what fish amok or Kampot pepper crab are supposed to taste like, calibrate here. Open all day, garden setting, smarter dress welcome.

The Khmer Classics

• The Sugar Palm — chef Kethana Dunnet’s wooden-house restaurant is where visiting chefs come to learn amok (she famously taught Gordon Ramsay). Green mango salad, river fish curry and lok lak done straight, no fusion flourishes.
• Chanrey Tree — contemporary Khmer on the riverside, midway between the classics and fine dining. A dependable “nice dinner” pick when you don’t want a full tasting menu.
• Whatever else you order in town, eat num banh chok once at a market for breakfast — the Khmer food guide explains the dishes worth chasing.

Eat Well, Do Good: The Training Restaurants

Siem Reap pioneered the social-enterprise restaurant, and two remain excellent in their own right:

• Marum — part of the Friends International training network, serving creative Khmer small plates in a candlelit garden. The red tree ant and beef stir-fry is the famous order; most plates run $6–15. Staff are students building hospitality careers — this is responsible tourism that tastes good.
• HAVEN — a Swiss-founded training restaurant on the Chocolate Road strip giving at-risk young adults a full kitchen education. Khmer-inspired weekly menus, $8–18 mains, deservedly hard to walk into at dinner — reserve.

Cheap, Local and Open Late

• Khmer Grill and Sambo Khmer & Thai (both in the Wat Damnak quarter) — grilled meats, soups and seafood at local prices, $3–8 a head.
• Golden Cafe (Best Khmer) — home-style Khmer cooking from a few dollars, zero decor, full flavour.
• The night markets along the river and around the Old Market fill after dark with noodle stalls and $1 kuy teav — the safe bet is the stall with the longest local queue.

Beyond Khmer Food

For the days temple legs demand comfort food: Mesa is the town’s brunch institution (shakshuka, serious coffee), The Bean Embassy roasts single-origin Cambodian beans and doubles as the best laptop café, Lost City Pizza Society near the riverside night market does the best pizza in town, and Kilimandjaro flies the flag for French fine dining in a colonial villa.

Know Before You Book

• Chocolate Road is the new food street — HAVEN, The Bean Embassy and a cluster of newcomers within a five-minute walk, and a better dinner postcode than Pub Street will ever be.
• Pub Street rule: go for the $0.50 draft beer and the people-watching, eat elsewhere.
• Reservations matter only at the fine-dining tier (Cuisine Wat Damnak, Embassy, HAVEN) — everywhere else, walk in.
• Budget: a superb food day here — market breakfast, local lunch, training-restaurant dinner — lands well inside the numbers in our Cambodia budget guide.

Eating your way between temple days? See how meals slot around sunrise starts in the 7-day itinerary, or take the flavours home with a Cambodian food deep-dive.