Eating in Vientiane

Vientiane is a gourmet paradise with first rate examples of every type of national cuisine available. Over the last month I have enjoyed a huge variety of foods. Excellent Korean restaurants, serving a dozen or more side dishes with their main courses, all were wonderful and tasty.Great Chinese food serving more varieties of dumplings than I knew existed. They would have made piggy green with envy the thought of all those different dumplings on his journey to India.

Lao cafes abound, there seems to be one in every third doorway, open air street restaurants, and market eatery filling the air with tempting aromas. There are Japanese, Italian [ one Italian visitor complained to me he could not get back home soon enough to have a pasta]. so you can't please everyone. First rate French establishment in Colonial Villas, I had dinner in one last night,  the food was excellent but the wine questionable. No doubt it must be hard to find a cellar at ten degrees anywhere it Vientiane. I have enjoyed some first class Indian and Pakistan curries, one called the Taj Mahal [what else] serves a delicious eggplant dish. The eggplants here are quite small, almost the size of a lime, unlike the large purple ones we are used to in Australia.

Even a Turkish cafe serving Dona kababs, naturally called Istanbul, and even an Australian restaurant for those who can't handle the rice intake. One day I lunched at the Makphet, a project to help and train former street kids. They learn English, how to cook, serve table, and manage a cafe, What a great idea, it is a pity some of our government bodies don't take this approach for our drop outs in Australia. This establishment reminded me of an American women doing a similar thing in Luang Prabang. She took young girls from villages with dirt floors, trained them in cooking and service, sent them to school. They learned English and many other things, so as to be able to gain employment when they turn sixteen. Most of these girl were unable to read or write, let alone add up when they started.

What are my favourite dishes, well the chicken and cashew nuts dishes I tried were very tasty, and the wide variety of eggplant flavours would be hard to beat. Finally the country has some excellent French bakeries. One I frequented, The Scandinavian Bakery [they also make French Pastries], claim to bake enough baguettes [ pardon my French] each year that if they were laid end on end they would reach Bangkok! At least you wouldn't go hungry along the way.