Posts Tagged ‘Family Night’

It’s with a heavy heart that I report on our last Family Night dinner here in Vientiane. As the day approached, we wracked our brains to pick a restaurant worthy of this momentous occasion. Nikki researched a dinner cruise on the Mekong, but most feedback suggested health-and-safety standards were questionable. (After all this time in [...]

Family Night a couple weeks ago had it all: mystery, humor, plot twists and even a celebrity guest! Nikki had chosen a local restaurant but couldn’t really tell us what or where it was. And if that wasn’t exciting enough, we had invited Yoga Lily, who was back in town on a Thai visa run. [...]

Well, this story is getting a big stale, eh? If you’re new to Family Night, here’s the scoop: Tony, a couple friends (Carol and Nikki) and I take turns picking a local restaurant for dinner once a week. By “local,” we mean nearby and geared toward Lao customers. This week’s Family Night restaurant had all [...]

You can make a lot of safe assumptions when you peek in a Vientiane restaurant to check out the clientele. Mostly Lao people? The restaurant probably serves cheap, delicious, spicy Lao food; the menu most likely won’t include English descriptions of the dishes; and if you don’t speak Lao, you shouldn’t try to place special [...]

This week’s Family Night began with its usual trepidation and ended with us wearing the restaurant’s promotional polo shirts, jumping up and down in our own little mosh pit and singing “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi with the karaoke microphones. In our ongoing quest to find a neighborhood joint we can call “our place,” [...]

If you’re driving north on Tha Deua, a main drag that runs parallel to the Mekong River here in Vientiane, and you want to get to our house, just turn right at the sign for Waterside Pub and Restaurant. We’ve been using that landmark for more than a year, but it never occurred to us [...]

After the grilled duck faces at our first Family Night dinner, our little posse lost some of its enthusiasm for the village restaurants. However, we didn’t give up. Surely we could find a local joint to call “our place.” The week after Anna Grilled Duck, it was Tony’s turn to pick an eatery. He chose [...]

Last year Daeng cooked dinners for us three nights a week. She usually prepared so much food that we could eat leftovers for lunch. This year she wanted to go back to school to study English, and of course we wanted to support her (big eye roll). So we kept her salary the same but [...]