Food Festivals @ Wat Lao Saysettha?

[Melanie Wong]

From the animated Laotian manager of Thai Hut Valley in Cotati, we learned that the Lao buddhist temple, Wat Lao Saysettha, in Santa Rosa has food festivals with some frequency. Any reconnaissance on this?

Wat Lao Saysettha
3625 Moorland Ave
Santa Rosa, CA 95407
[phone]

[Melanie Wong]

I mentioned to the owner of Santa Rosa's Vang Vieng Khan that I'd been to the Lao new year festival in San Francisco. She said she'd been there too and was disappointed in the small number of food vendors and minimal programming. She said that the Lao temple in Santa Rosa had its festival the weekend after and featured a beauty contest, traditional dancing, more water (it is a water festival after all), traditional prayers, and much, much more food from restaurants and private families/individuals. The temple is quite active and has a festival with feasting every couple months, so could be a good place to find the real deal.

[DezzerSF]

A friend went to the Sacramento temple this past weekend for the festivities and said the food was so much better and more plentiful than the SF festival.

[Melanie Wong]

This owner was regretting that she didn't have a food booth in SF, she'd been asked to participate, as she would have made a killing. She said it's the first year, and hopefully the organizers learned from the experience and can do a better job next time. She let them know what she thought.

[Ruth Lafler]

I was talking with a Lao co-worker this weekend. He agreed the SF festival was poorly organized and with the assessment that they could have used more food booths. He said the problems with the food booths were exacerbated by the fact that the Lao don't have a "queing culture."

I think there's probably an organizational learning curve for holding a festival in a large public space instead of in conjunction with a temple. Since I think they clearly established there would be support for such a festival, here's hoping they can build on this experience for next year.

[yummyrice]

As a Lao person, I agree with everyone that the SF festival was poorly organized and they only had a limited selection of Lao dishes. They only had grilled items, larb, papaya salad, a couple of dipping sauces, and some desserts! LOL! There's so much more to Lao cuisine than those items. They didn't offer any soups, noodle dishes, curries, steamed items, other Lao salads, or fried rice.