I have consistently been surprised by the different types of international food available in Vientiane. I also wanted to include what a normal diet consists of and what products are considered expensive.

Finger-lickin’ Good

Vientiane is the capital of Laos, so it has the most international food options by far. It is easy to find Lao food everywhere, obviously. You can find Thai, Korean, and Japanese food easily as well. For some reason, there is not much Chinese food at all. This surprised me because Laos touches southern China. There are some hotpot places available, but they are quite expensive.

Anything else you can find is usually a one-off. For example, there is a wonderful Chilean place here called Bacan that I love. I’ve met the owner, César, and he’s great. He said that he makes about 5 kilos of tortillas a day. They sell well and are popular with customers. He has a tortilla press and everything! I was impressed! (I’m not sure how he got it to Laos, but where there’s a will there’s a way!)

There are also restaurants that serve Hungarian, German, Moroccan, Italian, Indian, Malaysian, Russian food, and more.

Courtesy of Guerra, C. (2024)

Pizza from The Italian Job in Vientiane. The owner is from Italy and moved to Laos! (This pizza was great.)

Hungarian food from Budapest Bistro in Vientiane

They have a pretty good schnitzel; however, it needs to be thinner.

The best thing at Budapest Bistro is the sweet lemon crepe. They’re Eastern European and use a special kind of cheese. They’re tangy and delightful. My friend Izabela is Polish-Canadian, so she was familiar with the Polish version of these, which are called Nalesniki. She told me that these online recipes (shared below) seemed legitimate and gave me some recommendations for how to make the crepes.

She adds vanilla and cinnamon to hers and uses less butter and sugar than most recipes call for. It all depends on the cheese and on not using too much sugar. You have to go to a special European deli to find the right cheese. It’s called twarog. Use the whole egg in your recipe, not just the yolk. Any way you make the crepes is fine.

You can make these crepes and fill them with whatever you want. Izabela told me that the lemon and cheese is the most simple and most popular crepe option available in Poland.

Whip up some Polish crepes with sweet cheese filling

Make your own thin Polish crepes

I’ve been to Berliner Biergarten several times. They have a great schnitzel. Wirsthaus also has a great schnitzel and currywurst.

Courtesy of Guerra, C. (2024)

This was a cool restaurant called Senglao that I visited with Izabela. Some of the seats are old movie theatre seats. There are old film rolls that they repurposed to use as lights. They also had a movie billboard with moveable letters that served as the menu. The bathrooms had dressing room mirrors with lots of big bulbs and statues of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. (Needless to say, this place was expensive and catered to Westerners.)

Courtesy of Guerra, C. (2024)

They had walls of old movie posters from around the world.

Vientiane has a surprising number and variety of international restaurants!

Expensive Restaurants in Laos

A normal, inexpensive Lao meal costs about 25,000-30,000 K (1.16-1.39). A meal at the cafeteria costs 28,000 K (1.30). Prices increased from 25,000 K to 28,000 K for most dishes at the cafeteria because inflation has been rampant in Laos. Some special dishes like khao na gai (Lao teriyaki chicken) are 30,000 K (1.39).

Non-Lao food is usually more expensive. A schnitzel at Berliner Biergarten is 80,000 K (3.72). This probably doesn’t sound like a lot of money to you. However, for the average Lao person, this is pricey. One of my students from Oral Communication 2A gave a presentation about her first job (the assignment was “An Experience that Taught You Something”), and she told us that she made 9,000 K an hour at this hard, awful job making pizza in a hot little kitchen. Dear reader, my student made 0.42 cents an hour. This is a normal salary for a fast food or student job. (People who work in international business, NGO, foreign embassy, or Lao government make more money than others in general.) People get paid even less in the country. So meals that cost 80,000-100,000 K are expensive.

Supermarkets in Laos

It’s hard to find ingredients here that aren’t Asian. For example, there are several large Asian supermarkets with food from China, Korea, and Japan. I haven’t been able to cook here because I can’t find ingredients I’m familiar with. I’m impressed that restaurants have been able to source all the ingredients they need to make international dishes.

Things that are imported are expensive. Mustard, Nutella, and peanut butter are examples of things that are considered expensive in Laos.

1. Mustard 60,000 K
2. Nutella (big jar) 180,000 K
3. Peanut Butter 60,000 K