The French menu makes the ‘fusion’ explicit: cream of pumpkin soup with bergamot leaf flavored coconut cream and so forth. That the use of coconut milk is not, historically, part of northern Lao cuisine hints at a complexity camouflaged by such descriptions. In contrast, and interestingly, the Lao menu is ‘fusion’ in description rather than substance. Laab Kai, a well-known Lao dish throughout Lao PDR and north-east Thailand, is described as ‘chicken tartare cooked with fine herbs and spices’.
These descriptions rest heavily on a number of assumptions. First, the national discursive frames used in them almost always have the status of being a priori and unexamined. Second, the use of national markers obscures intricate historical continuities and contemporary influences in the food economy. Third, the descriptions render less visible/legible the spatiality of food within the city. Fourth, the ‘fusion’ idea downplays improvization as an element of all cooking with the constant re-invention that occurs. Fifth, the cosmopolitan/global dimensions of the term ‘Lao/French fusion’ are crucial to the imaginary of Luang Prabang as a distinctive place of ‘universal significance’ and yet, in this process of making distinction, the primacy of ‘the West’ remains pivotal. Sixth, the way ownership of restaurants (Lao citizens, foreigners, ex-pats, former Lao citizens and various partnerships between these groups) exerts a rhetorical/representational power disproportional to the much more widespread production and consumption of food by local Lao residents of the city. This ‘elite’ control the knowledge practices. Seventh, the unexamined link between cuisine and place and the various ways Luang Prabang cuisine is conceived as being inextricably linked to the symbolic, the social and to the material when in fact, the symbolic is a construction. It is to these assumptions that we turn our attention.