Restaurant: Green Champa Garden 
Address: 42318 Fremont Boulevard
City: Fremont, California

My mom’s brother and sister-in-law came to visit from Australia! They wanted to eat Asian food except Chinese while they were in town, because they don’t have as much variety of Asian restaurants and beef prices are higher in Australia. I wrote down a list of restaurants arranged by country, and Lao food was chosen for tonight’s dinner.

Green Champa Garden is a restaurant that specializes in both Thai and Lao cuisine. We ordered mostly Lao dishes. I’ll be blogging about two dishes we had, an appetizer and a noodle soup dish (this post).

We had a noodle soup called ‘khao piak’, also known as ‘khao piak sen’, which was homemade noodles served in chicken broth with chicken ($7.95 USD).

We were told tamarind is usually added to the noodle soup, which was available on our table with a few other condiments. The chefs omitted tamarind from the soup, to let the diners be in control of how much to add into their noodle soup. Tamarind is on the sour side with a pungent taste, and is an acquired taste. Adding a bit of tamarind to the soup actually helped develop a bit of sweet and sour flavor which accompanied the chewy noodles.

Here’s more info about this khao piak, from WendyinKK:

Khao piak or ka’piek is a chewy noodle, almost similar to the texture of udon, which is made with wheat instead. For locals, we will find it not too far off from the texture of lai fun (and laska noodles) but lai fun is less chewy. The Vietnamese has another noodle similar to this, called banh canh. But served in other ways.

And more info, from CleanBirth.org:

Khao Piak Sen is the Lao version of homemade chicken noodle soup. Literally meaning wet rice strands, this dish is made of slightly chewy noodles and a simple chicken broth. Khao Piak Sen is the ultimate comfort food, perfect for the cold weather, a sick day, or just when a warm, hearty meal is desired.