saltnvinegarlex.com
Or....and hear me out...for $15 you could've triple up on this meat mountain of a deal
Now it's a value meal if you get 1 for $5
Forgot to mention the hesitation the papaya salad lady gave me, the pale white man, before tossing the Thai chilies into the mortar and asking how many. I said just a couple more and I can taste it but it's not overwhelming for sure. The biggest difference than a restaurant version is not the heat, but the funk. Lots of shrimp paste and fish sauce in this bad boy.
The Laotian version is even funkier. It’s great.
Looking at the vendor list now and the descriptions for like the 8 places selling papaya salad today it's likely she's Laotian!
See if they do a crispy rice salad, it’s got sour sausage and lots of herbs and it’s delicious.
This particular stand just did papaya salad and sticky rice desserts while selling plants and wares
imo it’s kinda perfect in a crispy rice salad where it has warm and crunchy flavors to play against.
just to elaborate on this, the rice salad (Nam Khao) is basically: make jasmine rice, season it with egg and red curry, pack it into balls, deep fry it, break it apart, mix in herbs and onions and sour sausage and peanuts, dress with a seasoned fish/crab sauce.
So, I recently learned that many Lao people will not refer to themselves as ‘Laotian’ as they consider it a pejorative name coined while under French subjugation (‘Lao’ + ‘Chien’ literally translated as Lao Dog). This was something I was not aware of for the majority of my life.
Huh, I had no idea! My assumption was that it emerged from the usual English suffixing process. Reading more into it it seems that it's still used officially to describe any citizen of Laos, while Lao is used to describe the specific ethnic group.
