Eat and meet

Phongsali

Located behind the central market, the Laoper Restaurant (T: (030) 578 8283)is friendly and serves Lao/Chinese food. The proprietors are very welcoming and speak a little English (but bring your phrase book). The food is freshly prepared in a kitchen in front of you. Seemingly this is the only restaurant in town with an atmosphere and is popular with locals and travellers alike.

A few houses on the main street of Phongsali have put up Bakery sign, and placed a plate out the front door stacked with donut variations. They're generally pretty good. Our pick is the one just up from Yuhoua Guesthouse, opposite the main entrance to the market. The sign is hand-lettered in blue marker pen and a display cabinet out the front door holds a small selection of five items: one plain savoury bread roll, one plain sweet bread, one savoury pastry stuffed with processed meat and spring onion, and two sweet rolls, one which looks like chocolate but is actually a raisinish fruit paste and another sweeter one filled with sweet bean, all perfect for an on-the-run snack. This bakery opens at about 12.00pm and closes when stock runs out, usually 4-5pm.

Opposite the Agriculture Promotion Bank and the Museum is a small shop, identifiable only by the Beer Lao flags hanging out the front, and the pile of cucumbers and papaya. Inside is a family home, where they serve pho and khao soi. They also serve green papaya salad and cucumber salad, made tangy with tomato, lime, fish sauces, chilli, garlic, salt and sugar. Sometimes they put tamarind sauce in to make it sour. To have it to your taste, watch while they prepare it and veto things before they go in the mix. It is usually the black shrimp paste 'gapi' and fermented fish sauce 'padaek' that foreigners don't like.

 

The Phongsali Hotel serves Chinese food at cheap prices. They have a fairly standard menu of stir fried meat dishes and noodle soups but are happy to make adjustments to the menu if you can ask for it in Lao or preferably Chinese. Customers are scarce, but a few locals hang out to watch very loud karaoke music videos. Service is variable. On Saturdays and Sundays a disco pumps on one of the upper floors, giving you something to watch as a noisy, constant throng of people heads up and down. The food was too salty for our tastes, but may suit the weary traveller who has hiked one too many hills.

The Yuhoua Restaurant is a Chinese-run, family restaurant and guesthouse and is most popular in Phongsali for its icecream. At about 8.00pm groups of young people congregate dressed in their best and flirt over their desserts. The icecreams come in four different colours, which are vaguely supposed to represent different flavours but is in fact all sorbet-style coconut. You get four light and creamy scoops for 2,000 kip. The rest of their menu is fairly similar to other northern Laos-Chinese restaurants, a variety of well-priced stir fried dishes, fried rice and noodles.