The formal dining room, La Belle Epoque, serves French cuisine and seasonal local fare. Today, the 29-room hotel again boasts French colonial styling, with four-poster beds and marble bathrooms. After lengthy negotiations, Billy Theodas secured a long-term lease and, in 1999, completed a vastly expensive restoration, footing much of the bill personally. (Read "Cruise in Style along Laos' Mekong River.") There were cracks in the walls and holes in the roof. They found dank corridors and chickens pecking their way around the building. Nearly 20 years later, with Laos reopened to tourists, Yusin, her son Billy who in the interim had established his own Singapore-based hotel-management company and grandson Jacques made a pilgrimage to see what had become of the grand dame. Their tenure, and an era, ended in 1975 when the communists came to power, seized the property as worker housing and sent the Theodas family packing. Built by the French in the 1930s, it was a mainstay of colonial Vientiane and in its heyday was managed by Frenchman Michel Theodas and his Chinese wife Yusin. Follow most remarkable thing about the Settha Palace Hotel is that it still exists.
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