sybarites

I would like to say that the majesty of the former residence of Lao Royalty inspired us to crave a more delicate cuisine but I would be lying. It was actually just a question of unbridled gluttony. But the residence was impressive, especially the Limoges china and bohemian crystal. And the antique sideboards in the dining room. (Can you see where this is leading?)

L’Elephant. This is the name of the restaurant at which we melted. They serve French food, impeccable with all the details and ceremony which we love. Marc won the toss so he got to order the duck, with a starter of French onion soup. However, I won in the end with the starter of greens with blue cheese dressing and pork fillet, sauteed wild mushrooms and *swoon* garlic mashed potatoes. Dreamy. Plus wine: exquisite. We went back there twice.

And then there was the Laos restaurant owned by the same group called Three Nagas. With Doug and Amy, we treated ourselves to a traditional Laos feast with stewed water buffalo (for the record: chewy), various savoury soups, minced pork wrapped in lemon grass, and steamed fish stuffed with pork. The laminated article posted outside the restaurant said that this place offered a taste of Laos that is different from Vietnam, different from Thailand or Cambodia and they were right. We could taste Laos in the dishes, taste the unique flavours and the bold meats. Except what we couldn’t taste past the spiciness.

I could go on about the food, about the great espresso that the bakery up the street made, about the fantastic cheeseburger at the sports bar, but I won’t because it would be better to take note of the falls. All tourists who visit Luang Prabang are required to visit Kuang Sy waterfall, about one hour outside of town along one of the dustiest, bumpiest road in existence.

I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

It was like something out of a coffee table book of pictures describing what one can see in the jungle. Or like what I imagine the first Europeans, foraging through Indochina, found and then described in letters written home and in voluminous, romantic essays. Though I’m pretty sure that those foraging falang didn’t wear their bathing costumes under their clothes so as to take a dip in the frigid blue water.

It was frigid. It was breath-takingly icy, especially when you put your head under. But the wine that we brought with us up to the falls warmed us right up.

Oh, those French. I can just imagine the life of leisure in which those colonialists must have drifted while in Vientiane. It’s warm in the day, but pleasantly cool in the evenings, the Mekong drifts slowly by the city and there is no chance of running out of French food.

While we did step out to do a small amount of touristing while in the city – most notably the monument known as the “Vertical Runway” because it was built using concrete donated by the US for building an airport runway – our main focus was truly on the food. There are just too many places to eat, too many cuisines to sample, too many balconies on which to relax and too many cafes in which to chill. We did our best to eat as much as humanly possible while there and were joined by Doug and Amy whom we met a couple months ago in India; it is brilliant to have friends once again.

The top two meals have to go to the the cafe where we ate breakfast three days in a row, and the DaoFa Bistro on one of the main streets in town. The breakfast place served some world-class, buttery, croissants and espresso. After days and days of Vietnamese pho to start the day, to have a little French in the morning made me melt. This place also set us up with a take-away lunch for our bus ride up to Vang Vieng and that meal earns the gold medal in the Lunch on a Bus category: fresh green salad (salad!!) with peppery vinaigrette and fresh, whole baguettes – one with chicken and wild mushrooms and one with real roasted beef, potatoes and grainy mustard. The heretofore gold medal holder was Pringles and oranges so this new champion will surely not be beat.

DaoFa hit dead centre of our weak spot: wine. We had to create a meal between lunch and dinner just so that we could enjoy a little carafe at a sidewalk table. I got a ham and cheese crepe, which was no slouch, but Marc won with the smoked-duck salad with walnuts and prunes. Smoked duck! Prunes! I can’t believe we left Vientiane without going back but there were just too many places and not enough stomach.

On our first night in Hanoi, we visited Highway 4, a restaurant we happened to come across while wandering in the old quarter of the city. We first flipped through the drink menu and were happy to find some flights of locally distilled liquor for sampling, of which we ordered two. Most of them had interesting flavours like ginger or rose-apple but some were un-finishable, like the one with the name that translates as “one night, five times, give birth to four sons.”

However, so as not to completely pickle ourselves, we ordered some snacks off the tapas menu. We were not, however, nearly hammered enough to order any of the items on this page:

Otherwise, we had a fantastic meal at a French restaurant here called “Cafe des Arts”. It might sound silly to be eating Western food when we have so much good Eastern food to try but I am weak when it comes to foie gras and cheese platters. Thus, we have prune-stuffed filet mignon with foie gras sauce and – heaven! – mashed potatoes, followed by a tray of French cheeses. We ate there twice in three days.

Completely unrelated, here is a picture of Hanoi traffic from our hotel room.

Traffic is a neat mass of confusion. The only way to cross the street as a pedestrian, is to walk slowly across the road while scooters, trucks and cars weave around you. The key is not to stop!
If anybody is interested, I’ve made an attempt at loading video onto YouTube; see a street in Hanoi.

It has been so rewarding to eat Vietnam with an insider. Our Easy Rider guides were so thoughtful as to order our meals and eat with us each day; that’s how we ate the best food in this country.

Before lunch on our first day, Bang stopped to pick up a few kilos of a fruit I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be passionfruit, our dessert for that meal and the following six. Cut in half, they are eaten with a spoon like pudding. Tart, sweet and juicy.


Along the way. we would stop at small eateries, mostly scrubby little joints with greasy tables and a woodstove in the back. A lot of them had names that were also the address and sometimes someone would be cooking meat over a tiny charcoal BBQ in the front. It was at these places that we would learn that bitter melon soup is eaten at the end of a meal, that tofu can be delicious when it is stuffed with spicy meat, and that crispy, deep-fried chicken can make an outstanding meal.

We also tried honey-barbecued squid stuffed with beef, stir-fried deer meat with morning glory, stewed wild boar, barbecued weasel (I think it was weasel; they didn’t know the English name for the animal but described it as “like a fox with a long nose”), and a fantastic seafood hotpot.


For breakfast one morning, we had Vietnamese steak and eggs, which were cooked as they were brought to the table on a scalding iron hot plate. The steak was actually buried beneath fresh coriander, tomatoes and cucumber and was only one of three different meats on the platter. We figured out pretty quickly that Vietnamese people love meat- I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much in one week.

Plus, at breakfast, there was always hot, Vietnamese coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

I think it’s safe to say that, while on this journey, Marc and I have been pretty open minded about the food we’ve eaten.  Some of the nerds who have been reading this blog since we left will recall that we’ve tasted fresh, curried, goat in Rajasthan, century eggs in Hong Kong, betel leaves in Gujurat, beef spine in Korea, and – lest we forget – fermented horse’s milk in Mongolia.  All of these things required a certain degree of bravery, a certain forced ignorance of the contents of our mouths as we chewed and swallowed.   But sometimes, we just don’t possess the courage to eat the unusual.

Most recently, as we travel through a region whose inhabitants will glean sustenance from almost anything, we’ve come across a few things that have proved too much for our sissy Western palates.  There were the fried tarantulas being sold by a couple of women at one of the rest stops on our bus journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh (I wasn’t even brave enough to take a photo, let alone taste one);  there were the crispy, deep-fried locusts which, again, I couldn’t bring myself to try;  and the fertilized duck eggs.   On  menus in Vietnam, we’ve seen ‘Fried Mouse with Onion’, ‘Fried Pork Hearts’, ‘Chopped Snake’, and a whole section dedicated to eels.  But  who am I to judge what is or isn’t edible?  At home, I eat oysters, snails, beef carpaccio and American cheese.  Thus, until I have tried any of these Asian menu items, I am just a pot calling a kettle black.

When we do get past the fried mouse though, there are some tasty things to be had in restaurants and from street vendors hereabouts.   We had a fantastic $0.80 lunch of BBQ pork with spicy vegetables and rice from a street vendor in Cantho, several marvelously delicious Vietnamese iced-coffees (we are up to 3 per day now),   and bright, fresh salad rolls dipped into spicy, peanuty, vinegar sauce.

It’s hard to prove but there seems to be an inverse relationship between the seediness of a food stand/restaurant and the brilliance of the food it produces:  the seedier the joint, the more tasty the food.  For example, on our first night in Saigon, we made it a priority to find and procure a decent bottle of wine to enjoy on the balcony  unexpectedly attached to our room in the guest house.  But what to consume with the wine?   After eating out so many times and for so long, there are times when we just want to stay in, and this was one of those times.  So, imagine how pleased we were to see a woman with a stall a block from our place selling Vietnamese sub sandwiches for $0.40.   Even better, there were a bunch of locals beating a path to her stall which is always a good sign.  We stepped right up to order two and watch as the fresh baguettes were filled with crisp veggies, a little soft, French cheese, and several kinds of unidentifiable meats and sauces.  When we got back to our balcony, I admit that I did open the baguettes and pick out the chunks of pork fat but otherwise, to quote Marc, “Those were the best forty-cent sandwiches I’ve ever had.”

Also of note, are the frog’s legs and the pho (pronounced like the ‘fu’ in ‘full’), a lovely, beefy soup with rice noodles, fresh basil and lime.  How could we visit Vietnam and not have pho at least once every two days?   The version to beat is the one I had today at a place called Pho 2000 where, according to the prominently displayed photos, Bill Clinton visited for lunch.  His people must have known the right people in order to find this joint.

The frog’s legs with mushrooms and garlic were something that Marc ventured to order while we were in Cantho.  I tried my first-ever bite of amphibian thigh and agreed that it tasted of chicken but with the delicate texture of a fish;  quite remarkable, actually.  The wine that he ordered, however, could be described as “grape juice with added alcohol” or as “a cross between a wild-berry vodka cooler and prison wine”.   Vietnam can cook a mean frog leg but it’s got a ways to go in the wine department.  I guess French colonialism can only penetrate so far.

I expected Phenom Penh to be a cross between a small Indian city and rough Ulannbataar, instead of a French colonial city with France’s refine tasted and inexpensive wine. Three restaurants we sampled provided some world class food for shoestring budgets.

On New Years Eve, after walking the riverfront reviewing menus of the many tourist-friendly restaurants, we selected the Dutch-owned Frizz for it’s authentic Khmer specialties and lengthy wine list. It was one of the best meals we have ever eaten. The beef with smoked eggplant was truly unique, with a subtle mix of tangy sauce and earthy spices. Amok, our second dish, is a common Cambodian dish of curried fish wrapped in a banana leaf and Frizz does an exceptionally good job in presentation and flavor. The hot evening called for a bottle of house white in an ice bucket to bring our bill to nearly $20 USD.

Across the street from the notorious Tuol Sleng genocide museum is the Boddhi Tree, a restaurant which deserves fame in its own right. Jan and I ordered triple-decker sandwiches with goat cheese, grilled eggplant and other vegetables. After craving goat cheese for months, it was a euphoric treat.

On our last day, we visited Friends Restaurant which trains street kids for opportunities in the restaurant industry. A small army of students and a few teachers, all of whom seemed to be in their late teens or early twenties, runs a slick operation with attentive servers, a creative menu and tasteful décor.

We selected dishes from the tapas menu, crustini smoked eggplant dip, marinated fish and cucumber salad, crispy shrimp wontons and cashew chicken with mango. Our drinks, green peppercorn strawberry margarita and chili pineapple margarita, complimented the tequila with sweetness and a little heat to create exceptionally creative and tasty margaritas.

Still eager to explore the menu, Jan finished off with splendid caramelized pineapple and ice cream, and I tried the lemon and blueberry cake. Again, we kept the meal under $20 USD.

Lonely Planet also directed us to a supermarket where we took advantage of the colonial legacy to self-cater a meal to remind us of France. Few pleasures beat brie, a good baguette and a bottle of wine sitting on a patio on a beautiful day. We already feel Phenom Penh’s epicurean luxuries pulling us back.

As if being the actual city where they actually filmed Octopussy (!) wasn’t enough, we have spent many beautiful evenings in Udaipur watching the sunset from our hotel’s rooftop patio overlooking the lake (and palaces) while sipping our G&Ts. We’ve consumed yet more good food and met some new people.

One friend we met, Krishna, was able to arrange for us to learn how to cook real Indian food from a lady who lives here.  Our attempts at making Indian food at home have been hit and miss because we don’t know exactly how to cook things, what some ingredients are and how the finished products should taste.

At least now, after joining Krishna on an early morning trip to the farmer’s market in town…

…and after having joined Hashouna in her kitchen at home…

…we have a much better idea of what to do.   With the exception of the take-out food we had at Dave & Karen’s in Halifax, Hashouna’s was the best Indian food I have eaten.  I look forward to attempting palak paneer again, now that I’ve tasted the best.

Ahmedabad isn’t really renowned among tourists as anything special. As a hub in between Mumbai and Rajasthan, it serves the travelling crowd well with several hotels, but doesn’t offer a lot of excitement. It is chokingly polluted – so much so that at times it was difficult to breath for the exhaust fumes – noisy and bustling but we had read about a great restaurant serving Gujarati thali so we had to give it a try.

Thali wasn’t something I was really familiar with before we visited India as I hadn’t seen it on menus in Indian restaurants before, which is basically the limit of my knowledge of Indian food. We read that it is kind of an all-you-can-eat tray of various foods and sauces but that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Also, the thalis vary according to region and we heard that Gujarati thalis were quite unique.

So, with anticipation of trying something new and delicious, we dressed up in our Indian finery (me in my new salwar kameez and Marc in his new polyester dress pants and sandals) and walked over to the House of MG Restaurant on the rooftop terrace of a heritage hotel.

In the lobby, we were presented with two set menus from which to choose: thali or deluxe thali. Each menu listed a string of dishes of which we had never heard so we just shrugged and selected ‘thali’. We were then led upstairs to the covered part of the terrace where the first course of veg pakoras and some kind of corn bread-y stuff was served with a coriander yogurt and a green, anise-flavoured juice. (We had stupidly forgotten the camera and were correct, it turns out, in thinking that we wouldn’t remember the names for any of the foods.)

Next, we were ushered onto the main dining terrace, lit with candles and decorated with small palms and ferns. At this point, we were given a menu of the meal which was about to be served (of little help to us stupid foreigners- for us, it read as “Eat the barblekurt with the skolwot”) and two small pages of instructions on how to eat thali. If not for that instruction sheet, we would have been entirely lost. As it was, we were pretty challenged by the whole affair. Unfortunately, it was a bit early so there were no other guests which meant that there was no-one else whom we could observe and copy.
First, they set a large stainless tray in front of each of us on which were placed four small stainless bowls. Each bowl contained a sauce/soup: yellow and savoury (dal?), white and sweetened, another savoury and something else with lentils. Then came two more serving dishes, one with a raw vegetable salad and one, a tray of condiments: spicy, jammy, raw onions, limes, and lime relish. With all this on our table, we had absolutely no idea where to begin; do we serve ourselves some salad? eat one of the soups, or are they actually sauces? select some of the garnishes for our plates? wait for more food? Oh yes, and there was a glass of salted buttermilk with floaties to drink.

The instructions, to which we referred for about the tenth time, said that thali is eaten with the hands, which we already knew, but that there are a number of rules to follow with regard to which hand is used for what. Right hand for eating, left for serving and drinking; but what about the soups? Do we dip stuff into the sauces with our fingers even though its hot? It was 80% mystery. Besides a couple of spoons for serving, we had no other utensils and, therefore, no choice but to just dive.

Eventually, we were served some chapatis which we knew we could tear into pieces and use to scoop up bites of food, and about four other servings of vegetables – bean salad, cauliflower stuff, eggplant stuff, something else… – and another couple of side-dishes/bowls with spiced yogurt and something else. It must seem obvious that we had virtually no idea what we were eating. But, fumbling though we were, it was all, without exception, very tasty thali and we ate until we were obscenely full.

The last challenge came in the form of paan. I’ve read about this in novels but could never discern what it was; it can be sweet, I knew, and could contain tobacco but that isn’t enough description to actually determine what paan is. Again, we had to pantomime our ignorance to one of the wait staff who demonstrated that the betel leaves wrapped into triangles around ‘something’ were meant to be eaten and swallowed as a kind of digestive. I took a big bite of one and learned that paan is filled with various spicy bits (anise and clove were the only two I could recognize) and menthol. I must have chewed for ten minutes before being able to swallow. That was my first, and will be my last, experience with paan.

At least we have pictures of a couple of things we ordered when we returned to the informal, ground-floor garden part of the restaurant. Never a disappointing dish.

This morning, we treated ourselves to a morning walk to the Starbucks on Istiklal street. There are 36 Starbucks in Istanbul and so far, we have seen only his one. It’s in a trendy area and it seems to be full of business people and private school teens.
During the afternoons, the pedestrianized street looks like this:

In the mornings, it is much less crowded so that we are able to walk without concentrating on not running into other tourists or Turks. Most stores seem to be open again after the end-of-Ramazan celebrations, so it’s nice to window shop again for clothes and shoes, scarves and tea, baklava, tree-trunk sized kebaps and turkish delight.

We don’t go for Starbucks very often here because of the option of going for tea. Served scalding hot, with two lumps of sugar in a small glass, our tea breaks have been something I look forward to each day. In our favourite tea shop, a short walk up the hill, there are boardgames and backgammon boards for people to use while sipping and puffing on hookahs. It’s cozy inside, with lounging cushions and pillows on the floor in a couple of rooms, and booths and easy chairs in the front and back. Such an enjoyable ritual to adopt.

Having failed to find cilantro, fennel, cardamom or ginger for some of our favorite recipes, we thought we might have more success with a Turkish recipe. Turkish Lamb Pitas with Tomato Sauce were a surprising tasty treat, even though we didn’t find cilantro—apparently it’s not actually Turkish. I feared using too much allspice, but it added a pleasant earthness along with the mint. We couldn’t seem to stuff enough yogurt into the pita, having to repeat the process as we ate to the bottom.

Pastries in Turkey are mostly variations on baklava, nuts and pastry soaked in syrup. We found a little shop in Beyo?lu with continuous stream of customers waiting for their turn at the counter, always a good sign.

Of the three pastries we purchased, the pistatio baklava was by far the best, probably the best I’ve ever had, and the other two were a bit of a disappointment. The large square was mostly shredded wheat, sort of like the cereal with a layer of nuts and soaked in a syrup. Unfortunately that syrup was not very sweet or otherwise flavorful. The green roll was almost mushy with the not-so-sweet syrup and the pistatio flavor was subtle. However, we are not giving up, there are many more sweets to try at the same store. Perhaps we can watch what other people order.

We like coffee with our dessert and what better coffee for Turkish baklava than Turkish coffee. I knew nothing about how to make it. When Janet inquired about the location of the Turkish coffee pot I responded, “That cup with the stick on it?” Fortunately we found an entertaining web page with excellent step-by-step instructions, so Janet was able to make it successfully on the first try. The process is quite touchy, requiring the right combination of water, sugar and coffee and then must be carefully heated and stirred in several steps to create a foaming reaction. The taste is…different, sort of like burnt chocolate. It is bitter, as expected, but not thick, except for the sludge that formed on the bottom of the cup. I’d drink it again.