DAY 21. Slave to the French

I peer over the balcony and watch as both adults and children drive through the streets on their motorbikes… adults and children walking across the road like the traffic isn’t there. The traffic trundles along, barely swerving around the pedestrians, like not hitting them is merely an accident. Motorbikes line every curb – just as much a part of the road as the double yellow lines in the UK. It suddenly struck me; if you owned one of these motorbikes and you left it somewhere upon this curb not to come back until hours later… how in Vientiane would you find it again?

    I suddenly wonder what I look like to the waiters of the restaurant, leaning over the rooftop balcony, a glass of wine in one hand, typing rapidly into my phone with the other.

    I’m at the L’Adresse de Tinay. A French restaurant located in Vientiane’s old quarter, directly above those night markets that held me ransom yesterday. This place is worlds away from the streets below. I call it a French restaurant… it is inspired by French cuisine – a combination of French and Laotian food. The Laotians after all were once colonised by the French. The abundance of baguette stalls appears the most obvious lasting influence – though if I was an architect I might say it’s in the building designs.

The restaurant was quiet and the number of waiters serving me was quite amusing. There were at least four: The young woman, the older woman, the gentleman, and the handsome gentleman. They were all Laotian. While I tried to make a bit of conversation with the others it was only the older woman who could really speak English. I naively imagined that talking with locals would be easier than this.

   The Romans are still at the dreaded “dreamhome” hostel… well, one of them is. The other jumped ship soon after me. I’m sure they’re having the time of their lives. I’ve had the whole day by myself and it has allowed me to dive into some free-thought I barely get time for.

    Not only has today been fantastically solitary, but it has also been a rejection of eastern cuisine. Hunting around in the sun this morning, searching for some breakfast, I was all spiced out. But then I found this whopper of a café. A place called Joma Bakery – a coffee chain scattered throughout South-East Asia. It’s got a lavish menu with lots of different western breakfast options and snacks; it’s equipped with plug sockets underneath every table and fantastic air-con. They even take card!

Anyway… back to the meal at hand…

    My starter is brought down. It’s l’escargot –  6 snails. They are baked and roasted into a circular cake of stuffing. A snail bake. Roast onions support the greasy structure like bastions cementing everything in place. The snails, buried here and there, are otherworldly delicious. Not quite as rubbery as shellfish, they slip on your tongue as you swallow them down. And when you chew them, they’re like liver, but milder and much tastier. The whole thing bled butter and garlic onto the plate. But I never took a bite without knocking back some red wine. As sharp and potent as I could have wished for.

    Then came my main. Medium-rare duck breast with potato and vegetables. Equipped with tiny glass of blue-cheese sauce and a crusty roll of bread.

    After eating nothing but noodle soups and curries for lunch and dinner over the past 3 weeks, to put chunks of tender duck breast in my mouth with thick cheesy sauce, crunchy vegetables and fluffy potato gave me an indescribable satisfaction. Never have I appreciated such food more.

    I didn’t choose this stomach. I’m stuck with it. And it is, more often than not, insatiable. Being out here, far away from any place I might call home has reinforced more than ever that what I appreciate more than anything else is great food in great quantities. I am, deep down, a pig.

    But dining out here tonight has specifically made me realise something else. Over the past few weeks, I’ve bathed elephants, white-water rafted, swam drunk through a tributary of the Mekong river and rode on the back of a motorbike through a foreign city in the dead of night, but nothing butters my bread like a bit of fine-dining, and when it comes down to it, no one does me better than the French. I’m a slave to their cuisine.