Catering a Canberra Event with Lao-Thai Food

Feeding a room with Lao-Thai food is not the same problem as feeding a table. The food is built to share, the flavours are strong enough to carry a buffet, and most of the menu travels well — but the logistics decide whether it works. This is the practical version, based on what we actually cook and deliver across Canberra.

First decision: do you want a truck, or do you want platters?

We run two different services and they solve different problems.

Street Eats is our mobile kitchen — a fitted trailer with two service hatches. We arrive at your venue and cook Lao-Thai street food to order in front of your guests. That is the right call for festivals, markets, school and community days, and corporate events where the food is part of the atmosphere. It needs space to park, level ground, and enough room for a queue.

Restaurant catering is food prepared in our kitchens at Dickson or Woden — platters, banquets and set menus for pickup or delivery. That suits boardroom lunches, birthdays, wakes, staff nights, and any venue where a trailer cannot go: apartments, offices, hired halls with restricted access.

If you are unsure, the deciding question is usually this: do you want people to watch their food being cooked, or do you want it already laid out when they arrive? Both are good. They are not interchangeable.

Working out how much food

Lao-Thai food is served to share, so the useful unit is not "one main per person" — it is the number of dishes on the table relative to the number of people. As a starting point for a restaurant-style spread: four to five shared dishes for four people, and roughly one extra shared dish for every two additional guests, with rice and sticky rice ordered generously.

For the truck, quantities work differently: people order individually, so volume planning is about service speed rather than dish counts. Tell us the headcount and the length of the service window and we will tell you honestly whether one trailer can hold it or whether you need us for longer.

Two things we will always ask, because they change the answer: how long is the service window, and is there a fixed time everyone eats? A two-hour grazing window is a very different job to three hundred people arriving at once.

Dietary requirements — ask early, not on the day

The menu already carries a lot of naturally gluten-free food: larb, som tam, the curries, sticky rice. Vegan and vegetarian options exist across the starters, salads, noodles and sweets. But "can you do it" depends on volume and on what else is being cooked that service, so the honest answer comes from a real conversation, not a dietary filter on a website.

Our kitchens are shared kitchens. We can tell you what is in a dish and what we do to keep things separate, but if a guest has a severe allergy, say so explicitly when you enquire and we will be direct with you about what is and is not safe.

What we need from your venue

• Access. Where can a trailer park, and is there a clear path to the service point?
• Ground. Level, firm surface. Grass is fine when it is dry; mud is not.
• Space. Room for the truck plus a queue that does not block a fire exit or a neighbour.
• Timing. When can we set up, and when does the site need to be clear?
• Power and water if the site has restrictions — the trailer is self-contained, but some venues require us to plug in.

Booking it

Enquiries go through the Catering & Street Eats page: date, venue, headcount, event type and any dietary needs. The more of that you fill in, the more useful the first reply is. If your date is tight, call the restaurant directly — 0499 905 867 for Dickson.

You can also see where our kitchens are on the locations page, and what is cooking on the menu.