Hotel menus can quickly go stale, so a luxury resort in Vietnam has come up with a unique solution: ask the guests what they want to eat, every day.

The restaurant, headed by Chef La Thuan An, specializes in French and Vietnamese cooking, and each evening’s menu includes choices from either cuisine.

One recent menu included pan fried prawns marinated with lemongrass and seafood risotto as the Eastern option and roasted lamb tenderloin as the Western option.

“There is no default menu,” Jean-Philippe Beghin, general manager of the 57-villa resort, said in a statement.

“In the same way that performance artists feed off their audience, we’ve charged our chef and food and beverage manager with acquiring new information about that day’s group of guests and using that information to develop that evening’s menu.”

Guests can also accompany An and the resort’s food and beverage manager Thierry Mounon on their shopping trips to the local fishing village to choose their dinner.

“It happens all the time,” said Mounon.

“People love to talk food. And really, when they’re on holiday, they want their gastronomic experience to be much more than selecting items from a one-size-fits-all list. So many people want an interactive dining experience.”

The hotel is located some 150 km from Ho Chi Minh City.

Tourism is a small but growing part of the Vietnamese economy, although the global economic slowdown and H1N1 flu outbreak have eaten into the number of visitors traveling to the Southeast Asian country this year.

Tourism officials were considering lowering the travel sector’s 2009 target of 4.2 million foreign visitors to 3.7-3.8 million as the global economic slowdown continues to take its toll on the country, said an official of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism last Thursday.

Source: Reuters, Thanh Nien