It is very hard to find somewhere which really sums up Laos properly, the whole place is incomprehensibly nuts, but Khouvieng Fried Chicken (locally known as KFC) comes very close.
Khouvieng Fried Chicken was for a long time the only place you could get vaguely fried vaguely chicken in Vientiane. The legend has it that a Lao guy went to America and ended up getting a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken only for his visa not to quite come through as expected so he came home and sought his revenge on the nasty Yankees by copying their chicken recipe.
But he is, and remains, a shockingly bad businessman so the Kentuckians need lose no sleep.
Khouvieng Fried Chicken is very far from being anything like the other KFC; the chicken is cooked in massive open woks, there is no front wall to the restaurant, no branding, and you can wait 30 minutes to pick up some chicken to go home with.
Even the copying of the KFC recipe was done very badly, it honestly tastes nothing at all like the American recipe despite the strenuous attempts to believe otherwise by the entirety of the expat community here, and the potatoes come from China.
The menu isn’t in English, and carrier bags (albeit red and white stripped carrier bags) of raw never knowingly refrigerated chicken are constantly brought in to be fried as you wait in line for your 2 piece meal. It is real tin shack job, everything looks yucky and uggy; it is the sort of place that gives swift and deadly heart-attacks to Western health inspectors.
Yet every night there is a big line-up of very souped up mopeds parked up outside and the cool youth of Vientiane come to look cool (and I mean really cool); usually there is more grease on their hair than their chicken and the hair styles are at the cutting edge of Laotian hair design; the 4 tables are packed with the super-cools of Vientiane.
Well actually not every night, as Mr KFC closes the place constantly. Not because he is mean, but every time there is any family event the place closes for a few days or a week or two. There is never any notice put up, they just all head off. It appears he has a massive family too, perhaps ¼ the time the place is shut.
In any Western country he’d be the fried chicken baron of Laos: has a great product (by Lao standards), great niche, reasonable prices, great brand awareness etc etc.
The shop is treated with such reverence locally that calling it “Khouvieng Fried Catfood” went down really badly with my Lao teachers, as in almost extra homework badly.
But when Mr KFC feels like selling chicken to people with greased hair and increasingly greased hearts, he does, and when he doesn’t, he doesn’t.
So Lao…
