This post is about Lao food — more precisely, the food you can try in Vang Vieng.
Vang Vieng is a thoroughly touristy town: everything the locals do for a living is aimed exclusively at visitors, and at European visitors for the most part. It used to be awkward to reach — there is no airport nearby, and in 2014, when we were there, it meant a bus ride along winding mountain roads. These days it is noticeably easier: since the end of 2021 a high-speed train has run from Vientiane to Vang Vieng, taking about an hour.
That is why the food in Vang Vieng feels more familiar to Europeans than, say, Thai food. The French influence has clearly played its part, but I would say European food appeared here first and foremost thanks to tourists. In Vientiane, for example, there are fewer tourists and nothing like the same variety — even the baguettes come with just one filling, not especially tasty and distinctly Asian: as if someone had stuffed green papaya salad into a baguette, drenched it in a hot-sour-sweet sauce and added some unidentifiable pieces of meat. Lao food exists in Vang Vieng too, but there is far less of it, and spotting something purely Lao on a menu is harder.
What I liked most was the convenience. Every menu is written in English, all the cafés have English names, and you can tell at a glance what you can order. A sample street menu:
All prices below are in Lao kip as they were on our trip in 2014. Café prices have risen since then (as a rough guide, as of October 2026 the US dollar is worth around 22,500 kip), so treat the figures in this post as history rather than a current price list.
There is none of the guesswork you get in Thailand, where you are never quite sure what a dish is or what it comes with (meat or vegetarian, and what on earth is in it). In Vang Vieng everything is obvious, so problems with food simply cannot arise — unless you count the fact that everything is tasty and plentiful, and it is hard not to overeat.
Vegetarian dishes are available everywhere, and there are even dedicated vegetarian cafés:
Another menu with prices:
The selection of dishes is practically identical everywhere — baguettes, pancakes, soups, pizza, shakes:
And plenty of breakfast options. This breakfast, for example, costs 35 thousand kip and goes by the name of Deluxe breakfast:
To my mind that could pass for a whole lunch: two eggs, ham, bacon, a sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms, chips, a baguette, jam, butter, and tea or coffee.
And here is another breakfast — fruit with muesli and yoghurt (25 thousand kip), with a shake extra (10 thousand kip):
Guess which of us had which! 🙂
And here are the baguettes we were so fond of — interestingly, every place makes them differently:
We tried them in various places, but the tastiest turned out to be right opposite our hotel, where they put in real hard cheese — not the processed kind! After Thailand we had really missed cheese. In other cafés you might well get an ordinary processed cheese slice instead.
The spring rolls with peanut sauce were delicious — a typical Lao dish (Thailand has spring rolls too, but they are usually deep-fried and come with a mystery filling). The price was 15 thousand kip, with fillings ranging from vegetarian to meat:
Practically every café has ordinary tables and chairs as well as sofas where you can sprawl all day. Surprisingly, plenty of people do exactly that — spend the whole day lounging in cafés. There are televisions everywhere showing Friends around the clock, which looks very strange when you walk down the street and every single screen is showing the same thing.
One of the cafés we grew to love — there was usually hardly anyone here, and the food was tasty (apart from the baguettes, which are better bought opposite):
And the view from here is lovely (only the unfinished building spoils the picture):
This same café did a very tasty porridge made with coconut milk:
The classic fruit breakfast with muesli and yoghurt:
Green tea at last! How I had missed it — there is practically no tea in Thailand, and what little there is costs a fortune. Proper tea, brewed from leaves rather than a teabag:
Lao coffee (served with many of the breakfast options) is unmistakable: so strong that it actually feels thick. Definitely an acquired taste. I did not like it, but then I am a latte fan, so I am hardly objective:
Another seriously filling breakfast option, listed as the Spanish omelet (26 thousand kip):
An omelette with onion, olives and ham, plus a baguette with jam and butter, fruit, and coffee or tea — and that is all ONE breakfast.
I really liked the choice of shakes (I keep comparing everything with Thailand, and Thailand loses badly to Laos on shakes): completely unexpected combinations such as mint–chocolate, mint–lime (like a non-alcoholic mojito), and a coffee–peanut one I loved. Everything is made from real ingredients rather than powders — the peanut shake, for instance, not from peanut paste as I had expected, but from ordinary roasted peanuts:
One of my favourites is the Mix Fruit shake — we never worked out exactly which fruits go into it, but the combination is stunning, something strawberry-and-watermelon-ish. Ask for it without sugar and they make it without sugar, and it is still tasty because they do not skimp on the fruit. In Thailand a sugar-free shake usually ends up watery; here it is excellent. Shake prices run from 5 to 15 thousand kip.
In that same café with the lovely view we also tried the pizza (35 thousand kip). Vova liked it; I do not eat meat:
I ordered the fish, which turned out simply superb — stuffed with herbs, including lime leaves — and very juicy and flavoursome:
A cheap Lao soup with glass noodles (roughly 10–15 thousand kip) — tasty, but the portion is enormous (we shared one between us), with lots of greens and vegetables. The fish balls were the only let-down, but you can simply leave them:
And these are the famous pancakes, sold on every corner for 10–15 thousand kip and cooked right in front of you. Our favourite filling was Nutella with peanut butter:
There is a sea of filling options, from sweet to savoury with cheese and ham. Interestingly, whenever we went back to the same café a second time, they would bring us a few bananas as a gift with our order. It was lovely to receive that kind of thank-you for an order — usually it is the customer who is expected to leave a tip, and here it was the other way round. Wonderful.
Another delicious memory from that trip is Luang Prabang Bakery, a marvellous coffee shop with a great selection of the most delicious cakes. Admittedly the prices there were more European than Asian, but if you have a sweet tooth (like me 🙂 and the place is still open, you simply have to call in at least once.
The display counter at Luang Prabang Bakery:
The chocolate cakes at 25 thousand kip a slice are simply stunning:
The coconut shortbread with nuts is delightful too:
So, as you can see, Vang Vieng has no shortage of food choices — far from it. For us, the main danger of Vang Vieng turned out to be neither the drink nor the weed that so many people write about, but the tasty food. When it comes to alcohol, though, it is no longer a joking matter: in November 2024 six foreign tourists died in Vang Vieng from methanol poisoning in spirits, so if you do drink there, stick to beer or factory-bottled spirits from a sealed bottle that you open yourself. Frankly, we spent the whole week having what can only be described as a festival of gluttony. After that sort of overindulgence you urgently need to recover, so in Thailand we switched back to fruit.
This post has covered only the cafés; fresh fruit and the markets are a separate topic. Enjoy your meal!
