Larb — or laap, or laab, depending on who’s mixing the bowl — is one of those dishes that hits you before you even taste it. The smell alone tells you you’re somewhere in Laos or the Isan countryside, where food isn’t fussed over, it’s lived with. It’s minced meat, usually chicken or pork or beef or fish, tossed with herbs so fresh they almost bite back, toasted rice ground into a nutty powder, lime juice sharp enough to wake the dead, fish sauce with all its unapologetic funk, and chili that doesn’t ask for permission. It’s bright, messy, loud — a dish that doesn’t whisper; it shouts.

Larb didn’t come from restaurant kitchens or carefully plated tasting menus. Its roots go back centuries, to the Indigenous communities who lived off the land, who knew how to turn raw meat, herbs, and spice into something that brought a whole village together. In the old days, larb was often eaten raw, pounded by hand, mixed with whatever greens were pulled from the jungle that morning. It was food for celebrations, the kind that marked the end of harvest or the return of someone who’d been gone too long.

As time passed and cooking techniques shifted, raw versions gave way to cooked ones, but the soul of the dish never changed. It stayed fierce, herbal, alive. Every region tweaked it — more spice here, more lime there — but at its core, larb is still a bowl of community. It’s what you make when you want to feed people you care about, when you want to say “you belong at this table” without saying anything at all.

In Laos, larb isn’t just food. It’s identity. A reminder that flavor can be simple and still shake you awake, that the oldest dishes often carry the loudest stories.