Restaurant in Brooklyn, United States
Small room, bold Khmer food, easy to book.
Bong is a small Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, serving traditional and modern Khmer dishes built around bold, sour, and fermented flavors. It landed on Resy's Best of the Hit List for 2025. Booking is relatively easy for New York, but the room is tiny — reserve a week or two out for weekends and plan to return: the menu rewards multiple visits.
Bong is a small, highly-rated Cambodian restaurant in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and it earned a spot on Resy's Leading of the Hit List for 2025 for good reason. Getting a table is easier than you might expect for a place with this much buzz — booking difficulty is relatively low — but the real payoff comes from returning. The menu is built around traditional and modern Khmer cooking, with a flavor profile that skews brash, sour, and unapologetically bold. If you have been conditioned by pan-Asian menus that sand down the edges of Southeast Asian cuisine, Bong will feel like a correction. Book it. Then plan a second visit before you have even finished the first.
The room is small. That is the first thing you notice. Bong operates out of 724 Sterling Pl in Crown Heights, and the intimate scale means the kitchen and the dining room are in close conversation. Visually, this is not a splashy, designed-for-Instagram space , it reads as a focused, personal project. The dishes arriving at neighboring tables are the real visual draw: vivid, composed plates that signal intention rather than casualness. Cambodian cuisine does not have the same footprint in New York as Vietnamese or Thai, which makes Bong's approach , serving dishes rooted in Khmer tradition alongside more contemporary interpretations , genuinely useful for anyone who wants to go deeper into Southeast Asian cooking. For context on how that cuisine fits into Brooklyn's wider food scene, see our full Brooklyn restaurants guide.
Given the menu's range and the restaurant's size, a single visit will not cover the ground. A useful way to think about it: use your first visit to orient yourself around the sour, fermented, and herb-forward flavors that define Khmer cooking at Bong. The cuisine leans into contrasts , punchy and aromatic, with acidity doing real structural work in the dishes. That first visit establishes your baseline.
On a second visit, push into the parts of the menu that felt unfamiliar or that you moved past too quickly. A restaurant that made Resy's Leading of the Hit List and appeared in "The Leading Things I Ate" round-ups is one where the kitchen is making considered decisions about what goes on the plate. Those decisions reward repeat attention. If you are eating around Brooklyn's Southeast Asian and globally-inflected restaurants , places like Kelang, which covers Malaysian cooking , Bong sits at a different point on the map and is worth treating as its own education rather than a comparison exercise.
A third visit, if you get there, is when you stop ordering cautiously and let the kitchen's more challenging or seasonal preparations do the work. That is when a restaurant like this pays off at full value.
Booking difficulty at Bong is rated easy relative to the New York dining market, which is a meaningful distinction. You are not competing with the reservation scramble required for tasting-menu destinations like Atomix or the months-out lead times of places like The French Laundry. That said, Bong is small, and small rooms fill faster than the booking difficulty rating might suggest on popular weekend slots. Book a week to two weeks out for weekends; weekday evenings are more forgiving. The 2025 Resy recognition will pull more traffic in, so that booking window is worth treating as a minimum rather than a ceiling.
Crown Heights is an easy reach from central Brooklyn. If you are combining the visit with other neighborhood dining , Confidant and Barker Cafeteria are both in the broader area , Bong works well as an evening anchor. For where to stay nearby, our Brooklyn hotels guide covers the options.
Address: 724 Sterling Pl, Brooklyn, NY 11216. Phone and website are not currently listed. Reservations are the safest approach given the room size. Price range, hours, and dress code are not confirmed in our data , check Resy or Google for current availability and hours before you go. No walk-in guarantee, but the booking difficulty is low enough that last-minute slots sometimes appear.
Quick reference: Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Book via Resy. 1–2 weeks out recommended for weekends. Easy booking difficulty overall.
Bar seating details are not confirmed in our current data for Bong. Given the restaurant's small footprint in Crown Heights, walk-in bar seats may exist but should not be relied on. The safest approach is to book a table in advance, especially on weekends following the 2025 Resy recognition. Check directly via Resy or Google for the most current seating setup before arriving without a reservation.
Specific dietary accommodation details are not listed in our data. Cambodian cooking at this level typically involves fermented ingredients, fish sauces, and shellfish pastes as foundational flavor components, so strict vegetarian, vegan, or shellfish-free diets may face constraints. Contact the restaurant directly before booking if dietary restrictions are a factor , phone and website details are not currently available through Pearl, so Resy messaging or a direct inquiry through Google is the most practical route.
Specific menu items are not confirmed in our data, so we are not naming dishes here. What the awards record tells you is that the kitchen's approach to traditional and modern Khmer cooking , bold, sour, fermented-forward flavors , is what drew Resy's Leading of the Hit List recognition in 2025 and appearances in "The Leading Things I Ate" features. Order toward the unfamiliar end of the menu rather than defaulting to safer choices. Cambodian cuisine's defining flavors come from ingredients and techniques that do not appear in most New York restaurant kitchens, and that specificity is the point of going. A multi-visit approach, as outlined above, is the leading way to cover meaningful ground across the full menu.
Explore more of what Brooklyn has to offer: bars, wineries, experiences, and restaurants. Further afield, Pearl covers destination restaurants including Le Bernardin in New York City, Smyth in Chicago, and Lazy Bear in San Francisco.
| Venue | Price | Booking Difficulty | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bong | Easy | — | |
| Border Town | Unknown | — | |
| Il Leone | Unknown | — | |
| Kelang | Unknown | — | |
| Vato | Unknown | — | |
| Third Time's the Charm | Unknown | — |
How Bong stacks up against the competition.
The room at 724 Sterling Pl is small, which limits seating options across the board. Given the restaurant's size and consistent demand — Resy named it one of the best new spots of 2025 — reservations are the safer route regardless of where you end up sitting. Walk-in bar seating is not confirmed available, so don't count on it.
The menu skews toward traditional and modern Cambodian cooking built around brash, sour, and bold flavors — a style that often features fermented ingredients, fish-based sauces, and pork. That's not a format that naturally accommodates many restrictions without compromising the dishes. check the venue's official channels before booking if dietary needs are a factor; phone and website details are not currently listed, so Resy messaging is your best channel.
Specific dishes aren't documented in available records, but the restaurant's reputation is built on deeply personal Cambodian cooking that leans into the cuisine's sour and bold flavor profile — so follow that thread rather than defaulting to the safest-sounding options on the menu. Bong's Resy Hit List recognition in 2025 tracks with the more adventurous end of the menu. A multi-visit approach makes sense here: the room is small, the menu has range, and one visit won't cover it.
Bong is primarily known for its core concept and execution in Brooklyn.
Keep this venue in your Pearl passport, rate it after you visit, and track it alongside every other place you collect.
