A great first meal of any full-day Laos food tour, this simple and satisfying bowl of rice noodles can be found on nearly every street corner in Laos.

Common throughout both Laos and neighboring Vietnam, there’s a reason why this dish is so iconic among travelers in the region.

Hours in the making, it begins with a massively deep flavorful meat-stock. The chef is usually up long before dawn, creating a gigantic drum full of soup and wheeling it to a restaurant’s front door. Be on the lookout for this stainless steel container, and a line of excited people beside.

Khao Piak Sen is unique among rice noodle dishes in that they use thick, hand rolled noodles. They blanch the noodles in the soup stock without removing the starch from the noodles, giving the soup an almost gravy like thickness – rather than a typical watery soup.

At the table setting you will usually find a small dish of fresh herbs, hot red peppers fried in oil (insanely good), shrimp paste, and often some dried crushed peanuts as well.

The history of this dish goes back thousands of years, the better known version made with rice instead of noodles. (I had a great dish of it myself, called Khao Piak Kao, on the way to our Khmu Village Homestay). If you find it, don’t forget to ask the chef for a few pieces of lime to take your rice soup to the next level.

Editor: Qing Cheng