Luang Prabang's Markets: What to Taste From Morning Till Night

In Luang Prabang the markets bracket the day. The morning market feeds the town; the night market feeds the travellers; and in between, the food of northern Laos — herb-heavy, smoky, built on sticky rice — waits to be understood.

The old town sits on a narrow peninsula where the Nam Khan runs into the Mekong, and it is small enough to cross on foot in about twenty minutes. That compactness is the whole opportunity: you can eat from one end of it to the other and back again before the lights go out. What you cannot do is improvise. The things worth eating here are served in windows of an hour or two and then gone for the day, so the order in which you do things matters a great deal. Give it two full days if you can. One day is enough to see the markets. Two is what it takes to eat them.

Key facts

• The morning market fills the lanes around Wat Mai, just off Sisavangvong Road, from before first light until roughly mid-morning
• The night market unrolls along Sisavangvong Road most evenings, typically opening around 5.30pm and winding down by about 10pm
• Sticky rice (khao niaw) is the Lao staple — eaten by hand, rolled into small balls
• Almost everything is cash only, in kip; carry small notes
• The old town keeps an enforced late-evening curfew, so evenings here end earlier than you expect

When to come, and when to stay away

The eating season and the sightseeing season are the same, and both are narrower than the airlines suggest. Roughly mid-November through February is the stretch to aim for: dry, clear, cool enough at dawn that you will want a layer for the morning market, and warm by the time the noodle stalls open. This is also when the bamboo footbridges over the Nam Khan are back in place, which matters more to a food itinerary than it sounds, because several of the pleasantest riverbank terraces are on the far side of the water.

Avoid March and April if you have any choice. Northern Laos burns its fields then, and the haze that settles over the valley is not a matter of soft-focus photographs; air quality across the region routinely reaches levels that public monitors classify as unhealthy, and it makes a long morning outdoors genuinely unpleasant. These are also the hottest weeks, with daytime highs often in the mid-thirties Celsius. The exception some travellers accept is mid-April, when Boun Pi Mai, the Lao new year, turns the streets into a three-day water fight and the food stalls into something close to a street party. It is a remarkable thing to witness. You will still be breathing smoke.

The rains run from roughly May into October. Heat and humidity peak, the Mekong runs high and brown, and the bamboo bridges are gone, washed out as they are every year and rebuilt by hand once the water drops. The produce is more interesting then, though: this is mushroom and bamboo-shoot season, and the jungle vegetables on the stalls are at their most unfamiliar. If you come in the wet months, plan the market for early morning and expect the afternoon to be interrupted.

Dawn: the alms bowl, then the morning market

Set an alarm for something close to 5am. The monks of the peninsula's monasteries walk out barefoot and in silence not long after, in single file down Sisavangvong and its side lanes, collecting the day's food in lidded bowls. Tak bat is a religious observance and not a performance, and the etiquette is simple enough that there is no excuse for getting it wrong: stay across the street unless you are giving, keep your head lower than the monks', do not use a flash, do not block the line, and do not touch anyone.

There is one food-specific rule that matters here and is widely ignored. Do not buy sticky rice from the vendors who set up beside the procession to sell it to tourists. It is frequently not fresh, and handing a monk food that will make him ill is the opposite of the gesture you think you are making. If you want to give, ask your guesthouse the night before to steam rice for you in the morning, or buy it at the market yourself from a vendor with a working queue.

Then walk two minutes to the morning market. It threads the lanes around Wat Mai, immediately beside the former Royal Palace, and it is essentially one long street with an alley branching off partway down. Vendors are setting up before the sun is, the crowd thins by around eight, and by mid-morning it is over.

This is a pantry, not an attraction, and the pleasure of it is in reading what northern Laos actually eats. Herbs come in fragrant mounds rather than plastic sleeves: dill, sawtooth coriander, lemongrass, galangal, Vietnamese mint. There are river fish from the Mekong still moving, forest mushrooms, bamboo shoots, bitter greens, live frogs, and things you will not recognise and should ask about. Look for the cooked food rather than only the raw. Khao jee ping are sticky rice patties pressed flat, brushed with egg and grilled over charcoal. Naem is sour fermented pork, sold by the piece. There are fried mung bean cakes, hand-rolled fresh rice noodles dressed with minced pork and herbs, and vendors ladling out noodle soup and rice porridge to market workers eating standing up. Expect single items to run somewhere around 5,000 to 15,000 kip apiece, which at recent rates of roughly 21,000 to 22,000 kip to the US dollar is comfortably under a dollar each. The currency has moved a great deal in recent years, so check the rate rather than assuming it.

A useful note on ordering: the words khao jee name two different things in Laos. At the market it is the grilled sticky-rice cake. On the street it is the baguette sandwich, a genuinely good one, inherited from the French and built with pate, herbs and chilli sauce. Both are worth eating. Say which you mean.

Mid-morning: coffee, river weed and the chilli paste

Luang Prabang takes coffee seriously, and the traditional service, a short dark cup poured over a slick of sweetened condensed milk, is worth having at least once at a market stall rather than in a cafe. For a version with its supply chain visible, Saffron Coffee, on the Mekong side of the peninsula, buys from highland growers in northern Laos and returns its profits to those farming communities. Ask for the cascara: a tea brewed from the dried fruit of the coffee cherry, the part normally discarded, sweet and faintly of raisin. Le Banneton, a French bakery in the old town, is the other institution, and the reason several of the smarter restaurants in town do not bake their own bread.

Pair the coffee with the snack that defines this stretch of the Mekong. Kaipen is freshwater river weed harvested from the shallows, pressed into paper-thin sheets with sesame seeds and garlic, sun-dried, then flash-fried until it shatters. It arrives with jeow bong, the chilli paste the town is known for, sweet and smoky, built on galangal and garlic and often enriched with strips of dried buffalo skin. The combination is a Luang Prabang signature rather than a Lao-wide one, and it travels badly. Eat it here.

If you want it served properly rather than eaten standing up, Khaiphaen in Ban Wat Nong is named after the snack. It is a training restaurant run under the TREE Alliance programme of the charity Friends International, where marginalised young Lao people learn kitchen and service work, the food is modern Lao, and the profits fund the training. It typically opens late morning and runs to late evening, and is normally closed on Sundays, so check before you build a day around it.

The noodle hours

Lunch in Luang Prabang is noodles, and the two dishes to chase are both morning-to-early-afternoon propositions that sell out.

Khao soi here has nothing to do with the coconut curry of the same name in Chiang Mai, and being surprised by this is a rite of passage. The Lao version is flat rice noodles in a light, clear pork broth, crowned with a dense minced-pork-and-tomato sauce deepened with fermented soybean, then finished with herbs, greens and as much chilli as you ask for. It is savoury and faintly sour rather than rich. Several small shops around Ban Wat Sene, the quarter in the middle of the peninsula, cook it well and shut when the pot is empty, often before midday.

The other bowl is khao piak sen: thick, chewy, hand-cut rice-and-tapioca noodles in a mild pork broth, finished with crisp fried garlic, spring onion and bean sprouts. Xieng Thong Noodle Soup, which operates out of a front garden beside Wat Xieng Thong at the tip of the peninsula, does a well-regarded version from a deliberately short menu; expect a bowl to cost somewhere in the region of 12,000 to 15,000 kip. The temple next door, with its sweeping tiered roof almost touching the ground, makes the walk worth it on its own.

The third thing to hunt, and the hardest to find done well, is or lam, Luang Prabang's stew: thickened with local eggplant, darkened with wood-ear mushrooms and long beans, and given its distinctive tingling heat by sakhaan, a woody peppery vine usually translated as chilli wood. It is served at lunch and at dinner. Tamarind, beside the Nam Khan in Ban Wat Sene, builds its set menus to explain dishes like this rather than merely serve them, which is the reason to go. Manda de Laos, set around lotus ponds that are themselves protected under the town's UNESCO listing, cooks family recipes in a considerably grander setting. Both sit well above street prices, and one evening at either is money well spent.

The detour: Talat Phosi, where the town actually shops

The morning market is real, but it is also small, central and increasingly visited. If you want the market that supplies Luang Prabang, go to Talat Phosi, roughly two kilometres southwest of the old town. It is a walk of about half an hour, or a few dollars in a tuk-tuk, with drivers waiting out front for the return. Indoor and outdoor halls sell live animals, meat, river fish, mountain vegetables, prepared curries, kitchenware, textiles and everything else a household needs.

We would put a couple of hours here above a week of restaurant menus. Go early for the food halls. Talat Phosi also sits on the road towards the Kuang Si waterfall, so the efficient version of this day is market at dawn, waterfall by late morning, back for a late lunch.

The other way to convert a market into knowledge is to cook. Tamarind and Bamboo Tree both run classes that generally begin with a guided shop at a local market before you touch a pan, and the market hour is the part worth paying for: it is where someone finally tells you what the unlabelled roots and leaves are. Morning classes usually include the market trip, while afternoon sessions tend to be the shorter format without it. These cost considerably more than a restaurant dinner, so check the current rate and book a day or two ahead in high season.

Dusk: the night market and its food alley

As the sun drops behind Mount Phousi, hundreds of stalls unroll along Sisavangvong Road under strings of lights: textiles, indigo, paper lanterns, hill-tribe embroidery, silver. Treat the main run as shopping. The food is off to the side.

Turn off the main stretch into the food alley near the Kingkitsarath junction and the character changes entirely, to plastic stools, charcoal smoke and vendors working over grills. This is where to find ping pa, whole Mekong fish split, stuffed with lemongrass and grilled in a bamboo clamp; sai oua, the coiled Lao sausage packed with lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime; mok pa, fish steamed in banana leaf until it sets like a custard; skewers of pork belly and chicken wings; and tam mak hoong, green papaya pounded to whatever chilli count you are honest enough to request. Order sticky rice with all of it.

The alley's buffet tables are the reason many travellers eat here every night, and they deserve a clear-eyed word. You take a plate, load it from trays of noodles, stir-fries, curries and salads, and pay a flat price, commonly somewhere around 20,000 to 30,000 kip. A full plate with a Beerlao typically comes in under about five US dollars. The value is real. The caveat is that the food sits out, so go early, watch which trays are being refilled rather than picked over, and choose the stalls with turnover. Bargaining is accepted on crafts, gently, with perhaps ten to twenty percent off the asking price. Nobody haggles over food.

Finish with coconut pancakes from one of the alley's griddle carts, batter poured into dimpled cast-iron pans and cooked until the edges crisp and the centres stay molten, served folded into a banana-leaf cup for a few thousand kip.

Then, if the bamboo bridge is standing, cross the Nam Khan for a last drink at Dyen Sabai on the far bank, looking back at the lit-up town. The bridge charges a small toll, usually around 10,000 kip for a return crossing, and the money goes to the family who rebuild it each November after the flood has taken it.

What to skip, and how to plan around the clock

Skip the craft run of the night market if you are short of time and hungry. It is handsome, but it is much the same stalls for a few hundred metres and the food is entirely elsewhere. Skip the rice sold to tourists at the alms ceremony, for the reasons above. And skip any plan that puts dinner late: the old town enforces a curfew of around 11.30pm, kitchens close well before it, and the streets go quiet quickly. Eat at around eight rather than ten.

Arriving travellers should also budget for the gap between the town and its transport. The China-Laos railway station is roughly twelve kilometres east of the old town, with shared minivans running into the centre at a fixed fare of around 40,000 kip and taking half an hour or so. Plan a train arrival for the afternoon; a morning arrival can cost you the market.

Carry small kip notes throughout. Cards are accepted at the smarter restaurants and almost nowhere else, and some stalls will not take US dollars at all. Draw cash in the old town during the day rather than relying on finding a working machine after dark.

Tip: Order sticky rice with everything and eat it as locals do — pinch off a small ball with your fingers, flatten it slightly, and use it to scoop. Cutlery is for soup; sticky rice is the original spoon.