Best restaurants in Siem Reap
Siem Reap: Private Street Food Tour by Bus or Bike
What's the best restaurant in Siem Reap?
For a genuine fine-dining Khmer meal, Cuisine Wat Damnak (chef Joannès Rivière's tasting-menu restaurant, closed Sunday-Monday) is the most respected name in town. For reliable mid-range Khmer food, Chanrey Tree and Marum (a training restaurant for disadvantaged youth run by the TREE Alliance) are consistent picks. Budget travelers do best at the food stalls around Psar Chaa and Psar Leu rather than restaurants at all.
How to use this guide
Siem Reap’s restaurant scene runs from $1.50 noodle stalls to $50-a-head tasting menus, and the gap between “tourist-priced and average” and “genuinely good” isn’t always visible from the street. This guide groups real, currently operating restaurants by budget and by what they’re actually good at, rather than a generic “top 10” list padded with whatever’s easiest to book a table at. For street stalls and markets, see our street food guide; for the food itself, see our Khmer cuisine guide.
Two general notes before the list: reservations matter more than you’d expect for the restaurants in the “worth booking ahead” category below, especially in peak season (November-March), and a 10% service charge is common at mid-range and upscale restaurants — check before adding an additional tip.
Fine dining and special-occasion meals
Cuisine Wat Damnak (chef Joannès Rivière) is Siem Reap’s most internationally recognized restaurant — a tasting-menu-only spot in a converted traditional wooden house in the Wat Damnak area, sourcing seasonal Cambodian ingredients and rotating its menu roughly every two weeks. Two set menus, no à la carte, around $30-38 per person for six courses. Closed Sunday and Monday, and small enough that reservations are close to essential in peak season. It’s the restaurant most likely to change how you think about what Khmer food can be — this isn’t simplified tourist amok, it’s a genuinely ambitious kitchen working with local ingredients.
Malis Siem Reap offers upscale Khmer dining in a garden setting (a sister restaurant to the well-known Malis in Phnom Penh), with a broader, more classic menu than Cuisine Wat Damnak’s tasting format — a good pick if you want a nicer, more polished version of familiar dishes (amok, lok lak) rather than an experimental tasting menu. Mains $8-18.
Embassy Restaurant, run through the Paul Dubrule Hotel and Tourism School, is a training restaurant serving a modern take on Khmer cuisine at a fraction of the price fine dining elsewhere would cost, since it’s staffed by students under professional supervision. A good middle ground between Cuisine Wat Damnak’s price point and a standard mid-range meal.
Solid mid-range Khmer food
Chanrey Tree, on the riverside near the Old Market, is a reliable, attractive choice for a full Khmer meal without fine-dining prices — amok, lok lak, and a wide vegetarian selection, mains around $6-12. Good for a group where tastes vary.
Marum, run by the TREE Alliance (the same organization behind Phnom Penh’s well-known Friends restaurants), is a training restaurant employing and teaching disadvantaged and marginalized young Cambodians hospitality skills. The food — a mix of Khmer classics and creative fusion small plates — is genuinely good, not just charitable-by-association, and it doubles as a way to put your restaurant spend toward a program with a real, verifiable track record rather than an unaffiliated “orphanage” gimmick. Mains $5-10.
Sugar Palm, one of the longer-running Khmer restaurants in town, in a traditional wooden building, serves home-style Cambodian dishes at reasonable prices with a calmer atmosphere than the Pub Street cluster. Good for a first Khmer meal if you want something unintimidating.
Pou House and Little Red Fox Espresso (the latter more café than restaurant — see our coffee and cafés guide) both draw a mixed local-expat-tourist crowd around Kandal Village and are reliable for a relaxed lunch.
Training restaurants — eating well and putting money somewhere useful
Siem Reap has an unusually large cluster of hospitality training restaurants, where the kitchen and floor staff are trainees from disadvantaged backgrounds working under professional chef supervision. This is a genuinely different category from the “orphanage visit” attractions we recommend avoiding elsewhere on this site (see our family guide for more on why) — these are working restaurants serving paying customers real food, not a spectacle built around vulnerable children.
Marum and Haven Restaurant are the two best-known: Haven trains young adults aging out of orphanages and at-risk backgrounds in hospitality skills over an 18-month program, serving a mixed Khmer-Western menu in a garden setting, mains around $5-9. Spoons Cambodia runs a similar model with a rotating Khmer menu. None of these need a special detour — they’re simply good restaurants that happen to also do this, and worth prioritizing over an identical-quality restaurant with no such program attached, price being roughly equal either way.
Budget and street-adjacent eating
For genuinely cheap, good food, restaurants aren’t the answer — the food stalls around Psar Chaa (Old Market) and Psar Leu market are. A full meal of grilled pork and rice or noodle soup runs $1.50-3, against $6-10 for a comparable dish at even a modest sit-down restaurant. See our street food guide for specific areas, times, and what to order. If you want a seated, air-conditioned budget option, local Khmer restaurants just off the main tourist strips (rather than directly on Pub Street or facing the Old Market) consistently charge less for the same dishes — walking two or three streets back from the main tourist cluster typically cuts prices by a third.
Pub Street and the Old Market area
The restaurants directly on and around Pub Street are convenient and rarely bad, but they’re priced for footfall rather than quality, and many run an identical “Khmer, Thai, Western, pizza” menu aimed at not disappointing anyone. Treat this area as reliable-but-average rather than a food destination in its own right — good for a first, low-stakes night out, less good if you’re trying to eat the best food in town. See our Pub Street guide for what the street is actually like and where the happy hours are.
Vegetarian and vegan-friendly
Vibol Restaurant, Peace Café (attached to a yoga studio near Wat Bo, with a fully vegetarian/vegan menu and a quiet garden setting), and the vegetarian sections at Chanrey Tree and Marum are the most reliable options if you’re avoiding meat and fish sauce entirely. As noted in our Khmer cuisine guide, ask specifically for no fish sauce and no prahok even at restaurants labeled vegetarian-friendly, since some interpret the term loosely.
Breakfast, bakeries, and cafés
Most guesthouses and hotels include a basic breakfast, but if you’re looking for something more, Little Red Fox Espresso (Kandal Village) and Common Grounds are consistent choices for a proper coffee and Western-style breakfast — a useful reset before or after a run of Khmer meals. See our coffee and cafés guide for a full rundown of the specialty coffee scene, which has grown considerably in Siem Reap over the past few years and is now a genuine draw in its own right, not just a tourist convenience.
Western and international food
Siem Reap has enough long-term expats and repeat visitors to support a real Western food scene beyond the generic Pub Street pizza-and-pasta menus — Italian, French bakery-café hybrids, and a scattering of Indian and Mexican restaurants are all represented, concentrated around Kandal Village and the streets between the Old Market and Wat Bo. None of it is why you’d travel to Siem Reap, but it’s a reasonable pressure valve on a longer trip, or for travelers with kids who need a familiar option occasionally (see our family guide).
Eating by neighborhood
| Neighborhood | What it’s good for |
|---|---|
| Old Market / Pub Street | Convenience, volume, budget-to-mid restaurants, street food on the edges |
| Kandal Village | Cafés, training restaurants, a calmer mid-range scene |
| Wat Bo | Sugar Palm and other traditional Khmer spots, quieter streets |
| Wat Damnak | Cuisine Wat Damnak and a handful of quiet, local-feeling restaurants |
| Riverside (northern stretch) | Sunset views, a small price premium |
| Psar Leu area | Cheapest, most local, least English |
A one-week eating plan by budget
If you’re in Siem Reap for several days, mixing budget tiers usually works better than committing to one: a realistic week might include four or five street-food or market meals ($1.50-3 each), two or three mid-range restaurant dinners ($6-12 each, e.g. Chanrey Tree or Marum), and one splurge meal at Cuisine Wat Damnak or Malis ($20-38). This spreads spend toward experiences worth paying for — the tasting menu, the training restaurant — while keeping everyday meals cheap. For how this fits your overall trip cost, see our travel budget guide.
Riverside and sunset dining
A handful of restaurants along the Siem Reap River, particularly toward the northern end near Wat Bo, offer a quieter evening with river views rather than street noise — a reasonable option if Pub Street’s volume isn’t what you want on a given night. Expect a modest price premium (10-20%) over an equivalent inland restaurant for the setting.
What “good” actually means here
Two traps are worth naming directly. First, TripAdvisor and Google rankings in Siem Reap are heavily skewed by tour-guide and tuk-tuk-driver kickback arrangements — some restaurants pay drivers a commission to bring guests in, which inflates both foot traffic and, indirectly, review volume, without necessarily reflecting food quality. If a driver is insistent about a specific restaurant you didn’t ask about, treat it as a sales pitch, not a recommendation.
Second, “authentic” is used loosely in restaurant marketing here — a restaurant with lanterns and traditional decor isn’t necessarily cooking more traditionally than a plain one next door. The restaurants named in this guide are included because they’re independently well-regarded by food writers, expats, and repeat visitors, not because of decor or a driver’s suggestion.
Booking and timing tips
- Reserve ahead for Cuisine Wat Damnak, Malis, and any restaurant with fewer than 15-20 tables, especially November-March.
- Lunch is far less crowded than dinner at nearly every restaurant in town — a good way to try a popular spot without a wait.
- Restaurants near the temples themselves (inside or immediately outside Angkor Park) are priced for a captive audience and generally mediocre; eat in town before or after your temple day rather than counting on much there.
- A 10% service charge is standard at mid-range-and-up restaurants; check the bill before tipping on top.
Combining restaurants with a guided food experience
If you’d rather have a guide curate a route than pick restaurants yourself, a private street-food-and-restaurant tour by tuk-tuk or bike covers several stops in one evening with commentary on what you’re eating:
Book a private street food tour by bus or bike Join a 3-hour behind-the-scenes tuk-tuk food tourCombining a restaurant meal with your temple day
Most visitors default to eating near Angkor Wat or Angkor Thom during a temple day out of convenience, but as noted above, options inside the park are limited and priced for a captive audience.
A better pattern, if your schedule allows it: do the early sunrise-to-midday temple push (see our Angkor Wat sunrise guide and Angkor in one day guide), return to town for a proper lunch at one of the restaurants above during the hottest hours (roughly 11:30am-2pm, when the temples are also least pleasant to walk around anyway), then head back out for the late afternoon and sunset. This turns lunch from an afterthought into a genuine break, and avoids the worst of both the heat and the food.
Frequently asked questions about restaurants in Siem Reap
What’s the best fine-dining restaurant in Siem Reap?
Cuisine Wat Damnak, chef Joannès Rivière’s tasting-menu restaurant, is the most internationally recognized — around $30-38 per person for a six-course seasonal menu, closed Sunday and Monday, reservations recommended in peak season.
Where should I eat if I want to support a social enterprise?
Marum, part of the TREE Alliance, trains and employs disadvantaged young Cambodians and serves genuinely good Khmer and fusion food, not just token charity dining. Embassy Restaurant, run through a hospitality training school, is a similar option at fine-dining quality with training-restaurant prices.
Is Pub Street the best place to eat in Siem Reap?
No — it’s convenient and reliably okay, but priced for tourist volume rather than quality. Walking a few streets back, or eating at named restaurants like Chanrey Tree or Sugar Palm, gets better food for similar or lower prices. See our Pub Street guide for what the street is actually for.
Do I need to make reservations in Siem Reap?
For casual and budget restaurants, no. For Cuisine Wat Damnak, Malis, and smaller upscale restaurants, yes — especially November-March, when the city is at its busiest.
Where can I eat well on a tight budget?
The food stalls around Psar Chaa (Old Market) and Psar Leu market, where a full meal costs $1.50-3, roughly a third of what the same dish costs at a sit-down restaurant. See our street food guide.
Is tap water safe at Siem Reap restaurants?
No — Siem Reap tap water isn’t safe to drink even at restaurants. Bottled or filtered water is standard and inexpensive ($0.50-1); most established restaurants serve filtered water or ice by default, but ask if unsure.
Are there good vegetarian restaurants in Siem Reap?
Yes — Peace Café near Wat Bo and Vibol Restaurant are fully vegetarian/vegan-focused, and most mid-range Khmer restaurants (Chanrey Tree, Sugar Palm, Marum) have a solid vegetarian section, though it’s worth confirming no fish sauce is used.
Should I eat near the temples during my Angkor day?
Only if convenient — restaurants inside or right outside Angkor Park are priced for a captive audience and generally average. It’s usually better to eat a proper breakfast before heading out, carry snacks and water, and save a real meal for back in town.
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