Tea Houses and Traditional Drinks in Siem Reap & Angkor Wat
A visual guide from the Siem Reap and Angkor Wat travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
Order kuy teav in a Khmer-Chinese noodle shop near the Old Market and a dented aluminium pot of weak jasmine tea lands on the table before the soup does, unasked and free. That gesture is most of Cambodia's tea culture in one move. The drinks people genuinely queue for are colder and sweeter: sugarcane pressed through a hand-cranked roller with a squeeze of kumquat, fruit shakes blended with condensed milk, and dark-roast coffee poured over a glass of ice that is strong enough to reset an early temple start.
Traditional drinks
Teuk ampov, the sugarcane juice sold from carts with a mangle bolted to the front, is the hot-afternoon default and costs well under a dollar. Tuk-a-lok is the blended fruit shake, made with condensed milk and often a raw egg unless you say otherwise. Palm sap, tapped from sugar palms and drunk fresh or left to ferment into a cloudy palm wine, turns up at roadside stalls in the countryside far more than in town. Sra sor is the clear rice spirit, sold plain and rough; the polished version is Sombai, near Wat Damnak, which infuses it with ginger, anise, coconut or chilli and runs a small tasting room.
Where to sit
Cambodian coffee is roasted very dark, often with fat or butter in the roast, and traditionally dripped through a small metal filter onto condensed milk. The shophouses around the Old Market still serve it that way to men reading newspapers at six in the morning, and it is worth trying once before switching to flat whites. For the modern version, Kandal Village is the centre, with Little Red Fox Espresso as the anchor, Sister Srey on the riverfront and Temple Coffee and Brown Coffee covering the dependable middle. Dedicated tea houses are scarce; the Chinese-style shops near Psar Leu come closest. Siem Reap Brewpub brews its beer on site.