SAIGON—“If you want to make poulet à la crème (gà sốt kem), there aren't any good mushrooms. You can't make Swiss fondue (lẩu phô mai Thụy Sĩ) because there's no cheese or kirsch (rượu kirsch). Two years ago they stopped importing wines. But I suppose we shouldn't complain. There's a war on,” said Madame Madeleine Leccia, proprietor of the Guillaume fell restaurant in Saigon.

Madame Leccla's problems are common to French restaurateurs all over Vietnam, where the art of French cooking is still practiced fitfully (ko đều đặn) and with varying degrees of success in most of the large cities of the country.

A Mountain Resort

But to get a really good dish with mushrooms one must go more than 100 miles to the mountain resort of Dalat, to a French restaurant called l'Eau Vive (Nước của sự sống), where the Catholic lay (ko lành nghề) sisters who run the establishment as a religious duty say the secret of their success is that they cook for God.

The closest authentic

French potage aux legumes (súp rau củ), with the same consistency (nhất quán) of pulverized potato and carrot and the same taste that the soup has in France, is in pastoral outdoor restaurant called La Biche aux Abois (Con nai bị dồn vào Đường cùng) in Thu Duc, 10 miles east of Sai gon.

All three of these restaurants are run or supervised by Frenchmen. There are now only a few thousand natives of France left in Vietnam, which until 1954 was part of the French colonial empire in Indochina.

Madame Leccia, for example, is Alsatian and has been here for 19 years. Her husband, a Corsican, died in 1962.

“It's my livelihood (sinh kế),” she says of the Guillaume Tell. “I've had the same chef since 1954. He is Chinese, but most of the recipes are my own.”

Popular With Americans

The Guillaume Tell, one of the best of the 30 or so French restaurants in Saigon—only 5 are owned by Frenchmen—is in a large, high‐ceilinged room cooled by eight air‐conditioners. It is favored by American businessmen and Embassy officials for catered dinners because upstairs there is a secluded room for parties that is considered secure from a terrorist attack.

The Chinese and Vietnamese waiters wear bow ties (cà vạt) and white jackets, and the maitre d’hotel (quản lý) wears a tuxedo (lễ phục), but Madame Leccia, a tall florid (tươi như hoa) woman with glasses, is the distinctive feature of the place.

The menu is like most French restaurant menus in Vietnam. It features such soups as consommé froid au porto (dùng lạnh với rượu porto), cream of asparagus and vichyssoise (súp Vichyssoise), each at about 90 cents, duck a l'orange (vịt sốt cam), at $2.50, tournedos (beefsteak hay chateaubriand) in several sauces at about $3, and a few vegetable dishes, none memorable.

The only wines available are the ones sold in the American Post Exchange (quân tiêp vụ của Mỹ), which dribble (tuồn ra) to the restaurants through the black market and are sold at inflated prices (nearly $10 for a bottle of Paul Masson pinot noir or Beaujolais, which costs a little more than $1 at the Exchange).

Madame Leccia, on whose restaurant's wall is displayed prominently a sign saying “in vino veritas (uống rượu sẽ nói thật),” said, “To import wines you have to have a license, and there's a 300‐ to‐500 per cent tax on them. It's the same with cheese. A camembert costs 1,000 piasters (more than $3).

What people really go to the restaurant for is the atmosphere, which by dint of murals (tranh vẽ trên tường) of Swiss chalets (biệt thự nhỏ băng gỗ ở Thụy Sĩ), and arrows bearing slogans like “carpe diem” (hành động ngay) and the motto on the menu (“He who knows not how to drink knows nothing”, kẻ nào ko biết uống rượu ko biết gì hết) makes it seem like a real French restaurant in a happier time and place.

The nuns’ restaurant in Dalat, l'Eau Vive, has both the atmosphere and the taste of a real French restaurant. Dalat is 5,000 feet up in the Annamite Mountains and there is occasionally frost there in the wintertime. The Eau Vive is in a villa that once belonged to a French colonialist.

 

Food Cooked Perfectly

“The possibilities of cuisine here are very limited, because there's a war on,” said one of the lay sisters, a dark‐haired young Belgian woman who said she did not want to give her name. “But we must cook the food perfectly, because if we did not, we would be betraying our vows.”

Foreigners in Vietnam learn that the way to order salad is to say to the waiter, “salade Dalat,” and the salad at l'Eau Vive is the best in the country. Most of Vietnam's lettuce and tomatoes are grown there because the colder climate suits them better. The tomatoes in l'Eau Vive's salad were red and juicy, not thin and drained as they usually are in Saigon.

The vegetable soup is better at La Biche aux Abois, a restaurant closer to Saigon, next to a manioc field under a grove of gum trees in Thu Duc, between Saigon and the giant United States Army base at Longbinh. The name of the restaurant mean the doe at bay and there are superb game recipes on the menu. One of the best that is occasionally on the menus is cuisson de sanglier (đùi heo rừng), or leg of wild boar.

The manager; a bald Frenchman named Robert Bords, has been ill recently, but his menu has a snappy sound to it. Sandwiches are called amuses — gueules (khai vị, ăn trước bữa ăn chánh), the French expression for some thing to fill your face with, and pork pâtés (pate heo) come in two varieties: petite and grande cochonneries, a play on words that suggests pigs but means inanities (những điều vô nghĩa).

The restaurant is a crescent — shaped space covered by a tin corrugated roof but otherwise open and surrounded by trees and flowering shrubs.

Most affluent Vietnamese who live in Saigon go to one of the numerous excellent and varied Chinese or one of the few truly Vietnamese restaurants when they want to celebrate. Despite the valiant efforts made by the remaining practitioners of the French culinary arts, who occasion ally do very well, the Vietnamese clearly know where they will get a better meal./.