Trendy and Hipster Areas in Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
A visual guide from the Siem Reap and Angkor Wat travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Turn off Sivatha Boulevard onto Hup Guan Street and Siem Reap changes register within about thirty metres. The traffic noise drops, the shophouses are painted in flat pastels, and a queue forms outside a small Australian-run espresso bar well before nine. The block sells itself as Kandal Village, a name invented in the mid-2010s for what was until then a quiet residential street. It works because everything sits inside a five-minute walk, textiles, ceramics, a tattoo studio, two galleries and a bookshop, and because the coffee is genuinely good.
The neighbourhoods
Kandal Village, around Hup Guan Street, is the design end, with boutiques such as Louise Loubatieres and Trunkh alongside Little Red Fox Espresso and Footprints. Across the river, Wat Bo Road and the lanes near Wat Damnak hold the guesthouses, yoga studios and quieter kitchens where longer-stay visitors and remote workers settle. Sok San Road, west of the centre, is the newer late strip and the route to Phare's big top and King's Road Angkor, where the Made in Cambodia Market sets up in the evening. The Lane and Alley West, immediately behind Pub Street, are the grown-up alternative to the main drag.
Bars worth the walk
Miss Wong, in The Lane, is the room that set the tone: 1930s Shanghai red lacquer, lychee martinis and a floor small enough that arriving before nine helps. Asana Wooden House, a traditional stilted timber house left standing between concrete neighbours, serves rice-spirit cocktails on floor cushions in what amounts to a garden. Laundry Bar nearby runs later and louder, with live music on some nights. Pub Street itself is a short, dense wall of buckets and bass, best treated as a walk-through. Since the 2022 to 2023 rebuild of the town's roads, pavements and cycle lanes make moving between these pockets far easier.