Phnom Penh Bars & Nightlife: A Guide to Drinking in the Capital
From a gin bar in a lantern-lit lane off Street 308 to a whisky library on the thirty-seventh floor of Vattanac Tower, Phnom Penh drinks better (and later) than almost anywhere in the region. Here is how to navigate a city with no single nightlife strip.
Phnom Penh has no Pub Street, and anyone who has spent an evening here is grateful for it. The city's drinking culture is not concentrated into one strip for the convenience of visitors. It is scattered, down alleys barely wide enough for a tuk-tuk, up towers with lifts that take a full minute to reach the top, into converted colonial villas, behind vending machines, and along stretches of numbered street where a bar and a mechanic's workshop sit side by side without either seeming out of place.
That scattering is the point. It means the city rewards people who learn its geography rather than people who simply arrive. It also means the bars themselves have had to be good: with no captive strip of tourists stumbling past the door, a Phnom Penh bar survives on regulars, and regulars are unforgiving. The result is a drinking scene with genuine depth, one of Asia's fifty best bars sits a fifteen-minute tuk-tuk from a whisky pub with eighty-odd single malts and a Welsh-owned pub pouring craft ale on the Russian Market side of town.
It is also a city that starts late and finishes later. Sunset falls around six all year round, happy hours run to seven, and the good bars do not begin to fill until nine. Several never close at all.
Here is where to drink in Phnom Penh, from the lanes to the rooftops to the last bar standing at four in the morning.
The Lanes: Bassac and Langka
Two alleys carry a disproportionate share of the city's nightlife, and understanding them is the fastest way to understand Phnom Penh drinking.
Bassac Lane (the tangle of shophouse bars around Street 308 in Tonle Bassac) is where the modern scene was effectively invented. What began as a handful of narrow venues in converted garages has become a lane where you can drink for an entire evening without ever getting back on the road. Kute Gin Bar (Bassac Lane) is the specialist: an intimate room built around gin, with a serious selection and staff who will steer you toward a G&T that actually suits you rather than the one you thought you wanted. A few doors along, White Rabbit (16A Street 308) runs an Alice in Wonderland conceit (chandeliers, antique mirrors, a classic cocktail menu served with a magnifying glass) that could easily have been unbearable and instead is one of the most carefully made bars in the city. The Advice From a Caterpillar is the one to order.
The rest of the lane fills in around them. PIXEL BAR (40 Street 308) leans Euro and cosmopolitan, with a Belgian owner, a deep whisky shelf and deep house on the speakers until three on weekends. Roodbar Phnompenh (M47 Street 308) is the mixologists' bar (a regular at the Phnom Penh Cocktail Festival and quietly the most technically accomplished room on the lane. Papa Wong's Cocktail & Wine Lounge (Street 308) puts tables out under the lanterns and works equally well as a first drink or a last one. CASA DIEGO (M34 Street 308) does Spanish tapas downstairs and cigars upstairs, with oxtail stew and clams in white wine that make it a legitimate dinner option rather than a bar with food. And The Welsh Embassy (M112 Street 308) is exactly what it sounds like) a tiny drinks-only pub, reasonably priced, entirely uninterested in pretending to be anything else.
For volume rather than intimacy, Back Street Bar (14B Street 308) sprawls across a garden, a rooftop and a repurposed swimming pool that now functions as seating, with DJs on Friday and Saturday and pizza by the slice at five-dollar-cocktail prices. AURA (11B Street 29) takes the opposite approach at the top of the lane, a charcoal oven, a considered Asian-European menu and a polished rooftop room that is the closest thing Bassac has to a special-occasion address.
Langka Lane, off Street 51 in BKK1, is the newer and denser of the two. BATTBONG (corner of Street 51 and Street 288) is the one everybody sends visitors to, and deservedly: the door is a Coca-Cola vending machine, and the handle is the trick. Inside, low light, plush sofas, tapas and live music from half past seven. It is a gimmick that has earned the right to be one. Embargo Craft Beer (Langka Lane, off Street 51) is the serious beer address in BKK1 (more than forty-five styles across taps and bottles, Cambodian and imported, and staff who can talk through all of them. The Garrison (47 Street 51) borrows its name and its low-lit menace from Peaky Blinders and pours a good Negroni. Groovy Room (132Z Street 51) mixes eighteenth-century French architecture with hip-hop and Korean influences and prices most of its cocktails between three and eight dollars. TicTic (132Z Street 51) runs three floors and a rooftop, each with a different mood, plus a PS5 and film nights) a bar that has worked out that people want somewhere to be, not just somewhere to drink.
Cocktails Taken Seriously
Above the lanes sits a small group of bars where the drink itself is the entire proposition.
Sora (Level 37, Vattanac Capital Tower) is the city's most decorated bar, ranked among Asia's fifty best, with a cantilevered open-air terrace hanging over the skyline and an indoor whisky library holding Cambodia's largest single malt collection. The cocktail programme runs Cambodian ingredients through a Japanese sensibility, and the wagyu sliders coming out of the charcoal grill are not an afterthought. It is expensive by local standards and worth it once.
Metropole Underground (Street 178) went in the other direction and dug down: the city's first subterranean bar, beneath the Hyatt Regency, done out in Parisian Art Deco with cast-iron detailing and colonial-era maps on the walls. The Passport menu builds seven cocktails around seven metro lines, live music starts at half past seven, and the room does the rare thing of feeling genuinely elsewhere.
Nothing in the city, though, carries the weight of Elephant Bar (Raffles Hotel Le Royal, 92 Rukhak Vithei), which has been pouring since 1929. Charlie Chaplin drank here. So did Somerset Maugham and Jacqueline Kennedy, the Femme Fatale, champagne and cognac and crème de fraise des bois, was mixed for Kennedy in 1967 and has been on the menu since. The gin selection runs past two hundred bottles, a pianist plays, and the doors open at two in the afternoon for anyone who fancies starting early in considerable style.
For a genuine speakeasy, KRAVAT (10E0 Street 3, Daun Penh) hides behind a red door and a curtain in the centre of town, a small, low-lit room that owner Nel built around a rotating menu of properly made cocktails, from a clean dirty martini to smoky whiskey pours and the Tease My Peach. Open from six, Tuesday to Sunday; finding it is half the appeal.
For something rooted in Cambodia rather than imported into it, MAWSIM (133E1 Street 108) distils its own botanical gin in a half-century-old building fitted out by Cambodian artisans (wild cardamom, pepper and galangal in the G&T) and opens as a bar by reservation only in the evenings. Book. And Pomelo Bar (21AB Street 184), down an alley opposite the Plantation Hotel in Daun Penh, is the garden cocktail bar the city needed: a pineapple and chilli margarita, a proper Penicillin, wood-fired pizza, and no music loud enough to stop a conversation.
Craft Beer
Cambodian beer was, for a long time, whatever was coldest. That changed quickly, and the people who changed it are still running the taps.
Riel Brewing (Street 478) has been at it since 2013, one of the country's pioneering craft breweries, still turning out a rotating lineup of ales, stouts and sours from a small taproom, with a toasted coconut brown ale that has become something of a local signature. Botanico Craft Beer Garden (9B Street 29) brews its Cerevisia beers on site and serves them in a genuine garden: trees, dogs, kids, live music, the whole thing more Sunday afternoon than Saturday night. Hops Craft Beer Garden (17 Street 228) has been brewing its Bash range since 2016 under a German brewmaster who observes the five-hundred-year-old purity law, and the kitchen commits to the theme: schnitzel, pork knuckle, house pretzels. Pool, snooker and darts run alongside the taps, which makes it one of the few places in the city where a long evening has somewhere to go. The Toul Kork branch, Hops Villa (16 Street 323), works the same formula across a larger garden.
Two others matter. Sak Pub (behind the Patio Hotel, off Street 51) is Khmer-owned and Khmer-staffed, which makes it a rarity in a craft beer scene largely built by foreigners, and pours up to a dozen Cambodian beers on tap. Himawari Microbrewery (313 Preah Sisowath Quay) brews in the lobby of the Himawari Hotel on the riverside and does something no one else in the city is doing, a sweet ale made with Tonle Sap honey, an osmanthus pilsner, a pink guava gose. Happy hour runs from four to six with the Mekong going flat and brown outside the window.
Pubs, Sports and the Long Evening
The expatriate pub is a fixture of Phnom Penh life and the good ones are institutions.
Box Office (8E0 Street 258, near Wat Botum Park) has been running since 2014 and functions as much as a venue as a bar, musicians, comedians, a weekly calendar, and a kitchen that puts out pie and mash and a Sunday roast to a standard that has kept the room full for over a decade. Long After Dark (86 Street 450, Russian Market) is the whisky address: more than eighty single malts, bourbons and hard-to-find Japanese bottles across two floors, with four draught taps and a pulled pork toastie for the people who came for the beer.
The Irish did not arrive late. Phnom Penh has had Irish and Irish-leaning pubs for years (Paddy Rice, The Green Vespa and Rory's among them) and the tradition runs deep. What the city had gone without for a while was a new one: nothing had opened since Co19, until The Wild Rover (16E0 Street 178) arrived at the end of 2024. Irish-owned and Irish-run, it pours Guinness on draught alongside thirty-odd Irish whiskeys, a short walk from the river and busy from the day it opened. On the Russian Market side, Welsh Consulate (180 Street 460) does Welsh beers, quiz nights and rugby with a straight face.
For sport, the hierarchy is settled. SCORE (5 Street 282, Wat Lanka) has been the city's main sports venue since 2010, three bars, four pool tables, one of the largest screens in the country and the capacity to show seven matches at once, which is either heaven or a headache depending on your temperament. Harry's Sports Bar (219 Preah Sisowath Quay) is the riverside alternative, air-conditioned to a degree that matters in April, with a pool table out back and dollar draught. Aussie XL (18 Street 306) does super-sized portions and Monday fish and chips for five dollars, and The Big Easy (4 Street 172) runs two-for-one from six to ten, which explains a good deal about Street 172 later in the evening.
Rooftops
The rooftop scene is big enough to warrant a guide of its own (our pick of the city's best hidden rooftop bars) but no map of Phnom Penh drinking is honest without it. HighGround Sky Bar (Amass Tower, Street 63) spreads across an interior bar on the twenty-fifth floor and an open terrace on the twenty-sixth, with the Royal Palace and the Tonle Sap laid out below. Eclipse Sky Bar (23rd floor, Phnom Penh Tower) gives you the full three hundred and sixty degrees and a live band from nine. Le Moon (154 Street 154) has been working the riverside terrace since 2010 and still owns the best view of the confluence. Khmer Funk Sky Bar (TRIBE, Post Office Square) grills skewers over the old French quarter. And Sundown Social Club (86 Street 440) sits three floors above the Russian Market with a rattan terrace, a piña colada and no interest whatsoever in dressing up.
Wine, Late Nights and the Rest
Wine in Phnom Penh has grown into a genuine scene. Bouchon Wine Bar (82 Oknha Ket Street / Street 174) imports a hundred French wines almost none of which are available anywhere else in the city, and pours them in a colonial house with a terrace, alongside coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon. Glasses start at three dollars fifty, which is an argument in itself. Red Apron (19–21 Oknha Chhun Street / Street 240) has been a wine shop and tasting room on Street 240 for over a decade (buy the bottle, sit down with cheese and cold cuts, stay longer than you planned. A few doors along on the same street, Bacaro Wine Bar & Italian Cuisine (57 Street 240) pairs an Italian cellar with a kitchen to match, an easy address for a bottle and a plate of pasta in the same sitting. And Vinoteca (Street 184, behind the Royal Palace) is the low-key newcomer) an affordable, well-chosen French list by the glass, served with Hong Kong-style tapas and made-in-Cambodia cheese in a room built for staying a while.
When the pubs shut, the city keeps going. Pontoon Club (80 Street 172) is the capital's long-standing nightclub, open from ten until five, and remains the default answer to the question of where everyone went. Oscar's on the Corner (31 Street 104) is a live rock-and-roll room, drinks only, until three, no food, no pretence, no reason to be there other than the band. Hometown Hangout (Street 454) does live music in Toul Tom Poung with pool tables, foosball and a closing time of five in the morning.
The city's LGBTQ+ nightlife has its centre of gravity in Daun Penh, and its anchor is Blue Chilli (126 Street 130), which has been open since 2006 and is the longest-running gay bar in Cambodia. It spent most of that time on Street 178 and has since moved into the old Sharky Bar space on Street 130 (a piece of Phnom Penh nightlife real estate with a great deal of history attached to it, now doing something a little different with the room. The drag shows run Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the queens take the stage around half past ten, and nothing much happens before then) which is true of the whole city, but truer here. Karaoke on Thursdays. Tip the performers.
Two other rooms complete the picture. ToolBox Bar (12E Street 174) is the pub of the group, industrial-chic, long bar, pool table, dance shows from Tuesday to Saturday at ten. POC Bar (129 Street 19) runs cabaret and drag until four in the morning and is the louder, later, more theatrical of the two.
Tips for the Night
Timing. Happy hours in Phnom Penh generally run from four or five to seven, and most of the good ones are genuine, two-for-one, or dollar draught. Bars fill from nine. Arriving at eight in an empty room is not a bad sign; it just means you are early.
The lane strategy. Bassac Lane and Langka Lane are both dense enough that the sensible move is to arrive without a plan and walk. One tuk-tuk in, one tuk-tuk out, five bars in between.
Cash and card. Most established bars take card and ABA Pay, but the smaller lane venues and the late-night rooms are more comfortable with cash. Carry dollars; you will be given change in riel.
Getting home. PassApp and inDriver run all night and are the cheapest way back. Agree the fare before you get in if you are flagging a tuk-tuk on the street, particularly after two in the morning around Street 172 and Street 51.
Dress. Nothing in this city requires a jacket, but the tower bars (Sora, HighGround, Eclipse) will look at flip-flops. Everywhere else, the heat wins and nobody minds.
Phnom Penh does not have a nightlife district, and it is better for the absence. What it has instead is a city where a gin bar in a garage-width shophouse and a whisky library thirty-seven floors up are separated by ten minutes and about forty dollars, and where both are full on a Tuesday. The evening here is not a strip to be walked from one end to the other. It is a set of decisions (the lane or the tower, the beer garden or the cellar, the last band at Oscar's or the first light on the river) and the city will happily let you make all of them in a single night.
Browse every bar and nightlife spot in Phnom Penh on BongNham, or climb higher with our guide to Phnom Penh's best rooftop bars. Watching the match? See where to catch live sport and the World Cup, or recover the morning after over the city's best Sunday roast. Making a night of it? Follow our one-day Phnom Penh itinerary, or take the quieter route with An Evening on the Quay, dinner, the night market and a nightcap, in order.