I have actually asked this in a few countries, in China the most common answer I got was Peking duck or thousand year egg, every interesting processes.
I love to challenge myself in the kitchen, in fact its the only place I like to challenge myself.
Anyone who has worked in a kitchen commercially, what is your hardest dish, or one you just remember having the toughest time with? What specifically didn’t go right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mee_ka_tee
A lot of ingredients especially if you make your own curry paste. Real easy to have too much or too little of anything. So many ingredients that you pretty much have to make a lot but it goes bad fast so you can’t really store.
Plus some stuff taste a bit sour if boiled for too long and other stuff the flavor pretty much disappears if you boil too long so you have time it with when it’ll be served. And it’s just like any other bone stock dish where you can go hours to boil the bones. Then there’s if you’re doing just pork bones or you’re doing pork bones and fish bones. It’s a lot of timing that’s really not worth the effort unless the restaurant is in a community with a lot of Lao people that know the cuisine and buy it rather than buy stir fried noodles dishes. It’s a lot of steps. Sauteing parts, simmering parts, remove stuff in the pot to process process a bit to back in later or serve as a topping. There’s fermented beans to put in you’re high efforting this on the ingredients list
I’ve seen it go off the menu at multiple restaurants in the city I’m in and when asked why, the answer is always because the community the restaurant is in doesn’t buy it and it doesn’t hold well while it stays on the menu in communities with large Lao, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, Malaysian. Indonesian, Viet people. The people in these communities are all like, “oh shit I never seen this on menus and I don’t want to make that - too much work. Got to get that”