When Asian restaurant owners in the US open a restaurant, it’s not always under the name of their own cuisine. They’re met with the unfortunate reality that Americans are only comfortable with a few countries’ dishes: Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Chinese. So they either go under a guise where the marketing is already done, or identify as their own country and risk losing business to the popular cuisines.
Vaen and Moon Khounoudom, the brother-sister duo who own Flavor Lao Bowl, decided to boldly announce their Lao-ness when opening their Seattle restaurant in 2021. They wanted to end the practice of opening Lao restaurants under the cover of Thai restaurants, and make their cuisine a permanent draw for American customers.
When asked about how Lao food differs from Thai and other cuisines, Vaen and Moon hammered on the point that it’s more flavorful. And they have the food to back it up. Biting into the Lao sausage is an explosion of fresh lemongrass and herbs. The papaya salad is donned with 10 Thai chilis and a fish sauce called Padaek, which is fermented and thick with residual fish matter. It makes the fish sauce we all know taste watered-down. These dishes are not here to cleanse your palate, and are only tamed by the sticky rice that you’re hand-shoveling from a basket to go with each bite.
In our interview, Vaen and Moon explained how Lao food is so flavorful, and why it deserves its own name in the United States.
Flavor Lao Bowl specializes in hotpot. Is that a traditional cuisine in Laos?
Vaen: Hotpot is our own creation. We just created it here, because our family would get together and make a lot of hotpot. The base soup is Lao style. We also serve some more traditional Lao dishes.
Moon: The recipes for the hotpot were passed down from our great grandparents. There are 10 siblings in our family. Then you have our cousins and grandkids and grand-nieces and nephews. You can’t cook small portions. So we made hotpot to feed everyone, and our mom passed that on to us. She loved to cook, and was a really good cook. One day my brother (Vaen) said “Let’s do a restaurant business and serve the hotpot that our family makes”.
What ingredients are unique to Laotian food?
Moon: We use a lot of lemongrass, ginger, garlic lemon leaves, galangal, kaffir lime leaf, and herbs. You pound those in a mortar and pestle or put it in a blender, and that’s the base of a lot of Laotian food. You can add soy sauce and oyster sauce to that to marinate beef skewers, or mix it with ground pork to make Laotian sausage. Or use it as the base for a soup or curry.
Sticky rice is one of our traditional main foods that Laotian eat all the time. A lot of Asian cultures eat regular rice with everything, but for us it’s sticky rice. It goes well with barbecue chicken, beef, seafood, sausage, papaya salad, larb. We have it with everything.
In the restaurant we serve it in a small basket, but at home we have this big old basket. We fill it with sticky rice and the family just digs in. And you have to eat it with your fingers.
And fish sauce, of course. We have a fermented fish sauce called padaek, which is used in papaya salad.
The fermented one has real fish pieces in it and is thicker, darker-colored and more flavorful. Fish sauce brands like Three Crabs are not Padaek — they are just the pressed juice of the fish. Some people don’t like the flavor, and they can just use regular fish sauce or lime juice in Lao recipes.
What’s a good intro dish for someone who’s new to Lao food?
Vaen: For an introduction to Lao food, most people will try the khao piak sen.
Moon: Khao piak sen is a noodle soup that’s made from scratch. We use rice flour and tapioca flour and mix them together with hot water. You can do it with a machine, but at home we hand knead the dough and then just cut into noodle strands. It’s very chewy and sticky — you know how tapioca tastes. You make the chicken broth separately with whatever other flavors you want. We boil chicken, then add some chicken powder, lemon grass, ginger, a little sugar and salt. That’s the base broth which we add the noodles to before serving.
Vaen: In Laos, they eat khao piak sen almost every day as they wake up, before they go to school.
Moon: Breakfast, lunch, dinner, yes. You could actually have this way at all occasions. Just not in really hot weather [laughs]. And you can add anything you want in it.
Vaen: It’s good when you have a cold.
Moon: or hangover [laughs].
Other dishes that are great to try are ones you’ll find at any Laotian birthday party or wedding: papaya salad, sticky rice, khao poon and larb.
Why do you think there aren’t a lot of Lao restaurants?
Moon: A lot of Lao people may be afraid to represent where we come from and our traditional food. Not a lot of people really have the guts to say, “Hey, I’m going to open a Lao restaurant,” and then name it Lao. In the US, there are a lot of Thai restaurants because people know what Thai is.
Laos is a small country. When I say I’m from Laos, some people say “What’s that?” Not a lot of people know who we are. So our family thought we should put the name out there so people know what Lao food is. We could say Thai, but we’re not really cooking Thai food. It’s similar, but not really in taste.
Vaen: I think the Lao people are afraid they might fail if they open because nobody knows about Laos. What if somebody tries it, but doesn’t like it? So they don’t want to do it.
Moon: I heard from friends that California has a lot of Lao restaurants. They say it’s because Lao people are starting to open up more so we’re known for who we are and our food.
What’s been your favorite part of sharing Lao food with Seattle?
Vaen: For me it’s getting new people to learn how to enjoy Lao food because they don’t know about it. Once they try it, they love it. They fall in love with it and then they keep coming back.
Moon: We love to share, and that’s because we grew up with a big family. My mom cooked extra food that we would share with friends. It’s just a natural thing that our family always has done. We like to cook for people, we like to eat. And that’s the same goal with our restaurant.
It really makes us happy. People are learning what Laos and our food are all about.
Experience Lao hotpot and traditional dishes at Flavor Lao Bowl in the Green Lake neighborhood of Seattle. You can also follow them on Facebook and Instagram for updates.
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