Bong

Verdict: Book It, But Go More Than Once

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.

What You Are Walking Into

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.

A Multi-Visit Strategy

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 and Timing

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.

Practical Details

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.

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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.