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./.
