Table service

More booze.

According to second hand reports of hippy pilgrims to India, back in the day, all alcoholic beverages served in India were served in teapots. Such an absolute statement struck me as immediately dubious – in spite of the Troubles, I’m sure a few glasses were left over from the Raj – nonetheless, the image of a teapot full of beer was one I found charming. In Cochin, we were indeed charmed by beer served on the sly in teapots. Family harmony will be disrupted if I open the albums and reveal a sister mid-pour. Here instead is an abridged artist’s impression of beer poured from a teapot into a mug by a blood relative of mine. Enchanting, non? And great for table banter. ‘No milk with that, thanks!’ Chortle chortle. ‘Hmmm, refreshing!’ ‘Tikkety boo!’ We know how to have fun.

Sadly I myself was unable to pose for a photo with a frothy teapot full of beer having been at the time afflicted with some strange fever-bug which killed both my appetite and capacity to consume even mild liquors. These extremely serious symptoms were made a bit more interesting by some remarkable nocturnal hallucinations. I was honestly convinced my limbs were made of cheese. Happily, the delirium was brief and mild: it was over by daybreak and, as it was pointed out to me, did not transform my room-mates into hungry mice.

Incidentally, I have reason to believe that my malaise was due to an ill-considered chicken sandwich at an establishment named the Tea Pot in Fort Cochin. Cursed by a chicken sandwich, how damnably prosaic. The death by chocolate cake had been struck of the menu, the doughnuts looked like death, the staff claimed to be fresh out of samosas… I ate a chicken sandwich and paid the price. This blog’s style counsellors appraised the Tea Pot thus: 5 stars for ambience and decor (teapots hanging from the roof – catchy) and half a star cumulatively for service, food and germ warfare. And it was the Tea Pot which deprived me of my chance to drink beer out of a teapot. Don’t go there.

A Good Drink is Hard to Find*

It’s not as easy as it should be to order a drink in India.

We stayed at an Ayurvedic retreat near Cochin, a place where consumption of alcohol in the public gaze was verboten. Chakra disorientation or something. Thousands of years of clean living make it a habit. Maybe that is why Hindi culture has lasted so many thousands of years. Anyway, there was no alcohol on the menu whatsoever. Calling room service, however, changed the story. Not only were the staff ready to deliver beer to the door of our bungalow, they were prepared to charge into town and purchase any booze we wanted, as long as it was drunk behind closed doors.

We traipsed through Fort Cochin looking for cocktails with zero success. Here’s Lucy and Laura on the hunt. Two wine bars and one very seedy bar called XL, a non-option, were all that we turned up. Later, over dinner, a Dutch woman whose manner seemed innocuous and credible informed us that all the waiters at these establishments had hidden cocktail menus in their pockets, hard liquor licenses being too expensive. All we needed to do was turn on the old nudge-nudge, wink-wink, what-have-you-got-in-your-pocket, and we’d be showered with margaritas and martinis and, ahem, pina coladas. This prompted several days worth of suggestive, significant looks and hopeful queries. ‘Do you have any, you know, other drinks?’ ‘There wouldn’t be another drinks menu, would there? Something harder?’ The responses ranged from bafflement to giggles to offended refusal. Not once were we able to procure either a hidden menu or a civilised mixed drink. Was this an example of the fabled Dutch sense of humour?

The rest of the family left India this morning. There was a bar at our hotel in Chennai last night so plans were laid for final drinks and some moral debt wrangling and settlement via games of chance. My sisters and I set upon a pre-dinner reconnaissance mission to Grammy, described as ‘a sensual and intimate cocktail bar, with stimulating music.’ Although Grammy was a cocktail bar, nothing on the cocktail list looked drinkable. My days of blithely considering the merits of a drink which combines beer and whiskey are gone. The door seemed to disappear behind us as we entered the bar, an unventilated pit. Apart from an early nineties triptych of Madonna sucking her thumbs, we were the only women in a very full bar. It was neither sensual nor intimate and there wasn’t any music to offset the tranquillising smoke of four hundred Classic cigarettes. To make matters worse, the cricket was screening and if the headlines are anything to go by, being Australian in India is a bit of a liability at the moment. We drank our G&Ts very fast and bolted. There were no cocktails. End of story.

* And, with further apologies to Flannery O’Connor and decorum, a Hard Drink is Good to Find.

In an effort to salvage a modicum of high-mindedness, I enthusiastically commend O’Connor’s story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ to everyone to whom bleakness, Faulkner, the South, observation of the similitude of skulls and cabbages, the literature of the heinous mother-in-law, and clean-lined, hard-headed late Modernist short stories appeal. There.

Infantile Intoxication

It is snide to chuckle at orthographical lapses. Still, it’s comforting to know that the alcoholic peccadilloes of the English are catered for in northern India.

You can buy Child Beer outside the miraculous fort city of Jaisalmer which sits above an ancient artificial lake in the middle of the desert in Rajasthan.

The Honeymoon Crasher

November 2007 will stand as the month I crashed not one, but two honeymoons. As a follow-up to Sharath and Sorcha’s safari bonanza, I met two lovely fellows from London who had just tied the knot. We hung out at Kendwa Rocks and, until their departure the day before mine, my new friends shielded me from an influx of proposals involving cattle, life planning, and large families. As a result of this meeting, my life has moved one step closer to some kind of completion (or, alternatively, aesthetic entropy). Life experience #492: Part immersion of self in turquoise waters at sunset whilst wearing a loud bikini and large sunglasses and drinking the daggiest drink in the cocktail manual, a pina colada, complete with paper umbrella and redundant fruit slices.
Yeah yeah, I know, enough already with the sunsets. I was directed to Kendwa, a beach village on the north of Zanzibar, by a Zanzibar old-hand, an American lass whose judgment I uncharacteristically decided to trust on the briefest of encounters. I caught a dala dala along bumpy back roads from Stonetown through concrete block villages and wondered whether I’d been lead up the garden path. No, it was stupidly beautiful there, an impossible convergence of turquoise, aquamarine and out further, darker, deeper blues captured in the sea.

I lay on the beach, all white sands and palm-fronded umbrellas and my entire genetic being was confused. I am not configured for idyllic beaches but for fens and moors and crags: I have the pink and beige complexion to prove it. What with the sun and the photosensitivity enhancing medication, I’ve gained a whole set of interesting new freckles which may in the future form some meaningful constellations on my shoulders and hips. No doubt a few cells have started to wonder whether they should start to wriggle and twist in a non-conformist, melanoma type fashion. It was stupidly beautiful back there on Kendwa and I’m beginning to suspect that this kind of environment does in fact make you stupid. I certainly feel a whole lot stupider, like my brain has been poached. Sunsmart and pasty as I should be, I’m veering towards tan-dom, for starters.

Forgive all this blathering. I blame Richard Ford – I read The Lay of the Land on the beach. I should, all things being proper, loathe Ford’s WASPy male menopausal meanderings, in the same way that I should have loved Radclyffe Hall’s femo-sappho-Modernist extravanganza, The Well of Loneliness, which I suffered through last week. Oh gosh, modern life is so hard to understand and all of these changes in the social fabric, they’re tough too, and how, oh how, does one go about being a good citizen, a middle-aged man, a father and a husband, under these conditions? Oh me, oh my, blah blah blah. Three days are stretched into seven hundred pages, every incident a trigger to memory and digression, a more sophisticated version of the Sex and the City school of exposition: ‘and that got me to wondering/thinking/remembering…’ The Lay of the Land got under my skin in the same way that Independence Day did, with its expansive, waffly contemplations anchored by a litany of precise and incessant detail. I think it is the wry and bafflingly unironic narrative voice of the rambling, wondering Frank Bascombe, good man/everyman/sad man/just a man, that prevents the unabashed symbolism and allegorical contortions of the narrative from being as annoying as they really should be. It’s a smart, measured and weirdly affecting novel, one that I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to throw into the ocean. That’s praise, surely. Even though I can’t honestly hate Richard Ford, I do, however, hold him almost entirely responsible for the discursive nature of these last few posts. On the other hand, I have also recently read a couple of space opera sci-fi novels (ah, genre fiction, sweet narcotic) and you will note that there haven’t yet been any alien megaships setting down on the beaches.

Experimental

If you’re drinking beer in Kenya, you’re drinking Tusker beer. One of my comrades at Bustani Square had been apprised of a method to rid Tusker beer of undesirable matter. The precise nature of that undesirable matter was not specified but speculation placed it somewhere between additives, sediment and glycerine. To purify Tusker, one places the thumb firmly over the mouth of the bottle and then upends the bottle thus sealed in a bowl full of water. One then wriggles the thumb gently in order to make a miniscule opening so that the undesirable matter flows out into the water. Once this has been achieved, the very drinkable Tusker beer is allegedly even more drinkable and, miraculously, will not induce hangovers.

This task was performed over the dinner table and small bubbles did emerge from the upended bottle. Once settled, they allegedly formed a discernible puddle at the bottle of the bowl. Unfortunately, moments after this observation was made, the bowl toppled off the tabletop. The results of the experiment were not able to be verified. In the absence of a control, the Tusker experiment had to be deemed utterly inconclusive.

I add in closing that I have consumed a respectable quantity of Tusker over the last few weeks. The consequences of this consumption have been no sterner than those induced by other lagers of national repute.

Mulling up

Whatever happened to mulled wine? It was a vital fixture of my undergraduate life, a means of doctoring cheap wine into something delectably drinkable. Just add cinnamon sticks and cloves and orange slices and brown sugar to a cask or two of goon et voilà,* instant European fireside ambience, general loquacity and bonhomie. Mulled wine is closer to blood temperature than room temperature; the ensuing rapid alcohol absorption rate contributes to the conviviality. A regular reader of this blog lived in a house I frequented frequently in which was installed a pot-bellied stove. This stove mulled wine through winter as bees buzzed in the hives on the roof. Can a more wholesome image of that particular alpaca scarf wearing, dreadlocked, earnest slice of mid-nineties undergraduate space-cake be evoked? Sigh (fondly). Shudder (ruefully). Deny (vehemently). Move on (immediately). I refuse to attribute my taste for mulled wine solely to hopelessly accelerated nostalgia. It is good stuff: warming liquid gingerbread, pleasantly intoxicating, spicy sweet and deeply atmospheric.

Mulled wine, I recall hazily, was also a feature of a couple of parties in my tinier than tiny post-graduate apartment/garret in Paris. It was revived not just because the weather was cold but because it had performed so sturdily over Christmas in Grindelwald and NYE in Vienna. I do realise that it is slightly obnoxious to recall the pleasures of a draught of gluhwein and a plate of spätzli halfway down a Swiss ski slope but do so I must. Laura and Alex and I, underclothed and ill-housed as we were as we hailed in the New Year of 2003, were saved by the warming powers of mulled wine and hot rum punch. And hence, mulled wine until early spring.

After that, however, there seems to be a distinct and lamentable absence of mulled wine in my life. Should I blame global warming? After all, mulled wine is not a warm weather drink? Has Sydney lacked the chilliness which justifies mulled wine? Have I forgotten something? Is there a collective will to throw off the daggy whiff of hippydom which e’er shall waft over a pot of mulled wine? Is mulled wine destined to be the lentil soup of the boozocracy, condemned for its wholesome associations in spite of its inherent Goodness?

Shift to the Ukraine, where most menus have a hot cocktails section and all bars served mulled wine. It’s under 10 degrees outside and so a pudding of baked cottage cheese and cherries (only cooked on the weekend!) and a goblet of mulled wine seemed not only appropriate but necessary. My heart did warm and my cheeks, they did redden; my soul verily became a winged thing and flitter and fly with glee!

In the absence of anyone with whom to discuss such thorny questions as men who call themselves feminists, the lure of the system, and the impossibility of full fee paying local students in Australian universities (it was the nineties…), I set myself to silent resolutions. Comrades, the time is ripening for the next mulled wine revival. If the revival of mulled wine could somehow be connected to the sudden proliferation of small and charming bars in Sydney, I could be relied upon to return to Sydney before the end of next winter. Otherwise, a delay until gin and tonic season proper could be on the cards. Yet another wedding, this one scheduled for December 2008, forecloses the threat of staying away until Pimms season.

* This is not a recipe blog but to pre-empt discussion of variants, I note the following: apple and pear can be added to mulled wine aux belles étudiantes, as can cardamon and vanilla pods, cassia bark and star anise, although preferably not all at once. I lost my innocence somewhere along the way and learnt to add a reasonable dash of brandy to the mix.

Raise the Bar

Everybody knows that NSW liquor licensing laws give the state a bad name. Bars always get raised in tedious and interminable Sydney v Melbourne debates.

Sydneysider: Well, Sydney is an international city and it has beaches and better weather and the locals are far more attractive and intelligent and better-dressed.
Melburnian: Oh, that’s so superficial. Sydney people are sooo shallow. Melbourne has a better bar scene. We can drown our sorrows with style
Sydneysider: Well….so….maybe…well. (Splutters and struggles to find a response.) It’s because of the licensing laws! It’s the government! I blame the government!
Melburnian: Ha. (Puts on coat. Goes to charming small pokie-free local bar. Drinks smugly.)

It’s true, the paucity of small nook-dimensioned bars in Sydney and abundance of chrome-fitted pokie palaces can be slated home to the licensing laws. The NSW liquor licensing laws are being voted on in the next few months and you can lobby your local MP to do the right thing here.

Cossack Dancing

Like the young adventuress I diligently aspire to be, I have been fearlessly Trying New Things since I left Sydney. I have had many more stunning successes on the eating front than disasters but today the stars were apparently not aligned for eating well.

I stumbled into Dyzga, a café behind the main square, yesterday. One of the waiters spoke an English far less broken than my Russian and there was a menu in English on offer. They were playing Amalia Rodrigues; I drank coffee and ate a truly magnificent potato salad, crunchy with pickles. I earmarked the Snack Cossack’s Trick, surely a dose of bona fide Western Ukrainian fare, for today’s lunch.

The Cossack’s Trick was either a very nasty trick played on unsuspecting tourists or a dish just a little too genuine for a palate refined out of the fields. The menu told me that the dish involved Ukrainian bacon, pickled cucumbers, garlic toasts, cabbage. Fair enough, I thought, when in Lviv, eat like a Lvivski.

This is what arrived.
Note first the fluorescent plastic Cossack’s swords as they were the nicest touch of the whole dish. What I anticipated would be garlic toast turned out to be hunks of rye bread and slices of raw garlic. Rustic style, I guess. I wasn’t particularly heartbroken by the lack of cabbage on my plate but did wonder at the authenticity of the large olives. Enormous Caucasian olives, there you go, I thought to myself and speared one with a sword. It turned out to be a spicy salty pickled plum. My tastebuds were very confused, too confused to appreciate the plum which I might have otherwise relished. Half a jar full of slightly chlorinated pickles, I could have coped with under other conditions but, and here’s where it all gets really awful, the prevailing conditions involved Ukrainian bacon. That stuff that you might think is some sort of compressed chicken product or cheese or something, that stuff is Ukrainian bacon and it is a nightmare made of pure lard. Ukrainian bacon is slices of pork fat and really entirely unappetising. Wondering whether the bacon was just an unattractive delicacy, with the aid of a sword, I nibbled at one piece and needed to chew on a piece of raw garlic to clear away the taste and texture. I managed to eat most of the bread, a couple of plums, and only just dented the pile of pickles. I do not regret for a moment leaving the rest untouched: it was truly awful.

It’s turning my stomach just writing about this. I’m going to find a martini for dinner; I haven’t drunk a martini for weeks and I am convinced it will make everything better. Lviv, I sense, is just the city to deliver the goods. There’s a flashy deco hotel called the Grand Hotel up the road which has just had a paint job and that’s where I’m heading. With luck, I shall board an early train to Kiev tomorrow morning with my memory of the cruel plateful of Cossack bacon blubber erased.

Two beers

One of the luxuries of travelling alone and being quite disorganised is that rapid and frequent changes of itinerary aren’t particularly problematic. A fortnight ago, I was hellbent for Odessa. Last week, it was all about Albania. I’ve now realised that it would be folly not to detour to see my Pilsen contact for the first time in a couple of years. To get to Pilsen, near the German border of the Czech Republic, I need to go to Prague and to get to Prague from Budapest on the train, well, there’s Bratislava or Vienna. I’ve been thrilled by the new on many occasions but on this one, the lure of all that imperial regalia and secessionist art and gluhwein and late nineteenth century intellectual angst and goulash is impossible to resist. So Vienna it is, and from thence to Pilsen, home of pilsener beer, and onwards to Ukrania.

Treading this path, I am aware, will require some fortitude. My Pilsen host is a beer connoisseur of note and all of his emails have ended with some reference to the beers that will be consumed on our reunion. I need to toughen up so it’s goodbye, bellinis and champagne and martini bianco, hello, beers of Mitteleuropa.

Exhibit A
Lasko of Lasko
Union (pronounced ooo-nion) is the beer that is brewed in Ljubljana but I vastly preferred the Lasko, brewed in the wee town of Lasko. I randomly met a woman from Melbourne and even more randomly wound up carousing till the small hours with her newly discovered Slovenian cousins in Ljubljana and they all agreed, Lasko is far superior.

Exhibit B
Dreher of Budapest
One of the reasons Budapest is called the Paris of the East is, I suspect, because of the proliferation of long and endless boulevards which invite endless strolling. Just one more block. Just until we reach that square up there. No, let's keep going to the next one. (That's my internal monologue keeping me company there.) Not too many blocks away from where I’m staying is a fine establishment called the Zappa Caffe and there they serve all manner of drinks, including Dreher Classic, brewed in Budapest.
I drank this surrounded by airbrushed portraits of Frank Zappa, listening to De La Soul. I didn’t actually realise that these glasses hold half a litre of beer until I had drunk two of them and ordered another one and a Zappa salad. Gosh. I wondered, could there be anything more psychedelic than a Zappa salad? A salad with paprika! Hot Rats!


In France, you can order a gallopin of beer, which is a 100ml glass which would actually look quite like a thimble next to a Hungarian glass. Here, I haven't seen beer served in any vessel smaller than 500ml. Hmmm.

A Piece of Truth

Fact:

Wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, contributes not only to absinthe, but to vermouth and Campari. Once more, I lament not brewing the wormword roots I dug up near Aurillac.

A Tale of Two Cities

Genoa and Venice have been jealous rivals since the early Renaissance, the desires of their citizens to distinguish themselves one from the other comparable perhaps to those held by Sydneysiders and Melburnians, or perhaps, more acutely, by residents of Albury and Wodonga. That is why it may not have been a great idea to order a cocktail – a Bellini – inextricably connected to one city – Venice – in the other – Genoa.

I wandered onto a terrace which just happened to contain tables and chairs and a drinks menu after an exhausting afternoon spent admiring wonders of Renaissance art and the palazzi which house them. It was definitely cocktail hour but I surprised even myself when I ordered a Bellini. The waiter stopped being charmed by my feeble attempts to speak his language and gave me a slightly disapproving, slightly chilly look. When my drink arrived, he plonked it on the table without even a perfunctory gesture towards flirtation, a very unusual occurrence. No sooner had he twirled on his heel away from me and towards someone with a little more respect, the slice of peach, yellow, I note, not white, adorning the drink tumbled onto the tabletop. Whilst my choice of drink might have been a faux pas, the drink itself, I am happy to report, was delightful and exactly comme il faut: sweet, cold, sharp, frothy.

Aperitifs sauvage

Sloe gin is great stuff.

Aperitifs made from sloe, or blackthorn, shoots, might even be better.

Dipso du Jardin

Who can identify this plant? I’m restraining myself from issuing a roll-call of those who might (or should) be able to do so.

Give up? Les français call this l’absente. Les anglais call it wormwood. The world calls the drink brewed from its root – yes! – Absinthe! – and shudders with an odd mixture of apprehension and maniacal excitement at the very thought of the green fairy’s tipple extraordinaire. Had I been born a wench in Rouen in 1875, there is no doubt that I would have turned to absinthe just after running away from the evil Marquis’ scullery, hotfooting it to Paris and starting modelling for Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec. Had I been born a wordy, rebellious, precocious bourgeoise in Paris in 1845, I would have, to the distress of maman et papa, become hooked on the stuff as I tried to emulate young Rimbaud. God knows, I probably would have had to smoke hashish to keep up that act. And then? Downhill. Thank heavens for 1977.

In the vegetable garden which occupied my attention for such a prolonged period, l’absente grows wild. Myriam allows it to grow because the silvery leaves are so very beautiful in a flower arrangement. So wild was the path of the wormwood this summer that I was charged with digging up many stands of the silvery stuff. I made a feeble comment about cooking up some absinthe sauvage but the mirth which greeted my proposal was of the sort which made it very clear that there was not going to be any homebrewed absinthe. What did I do? Some will be shocked and disappointed to learn that with a heavy heart, I dug up the wormwood.

Here are some wormwood roots, which are what you need to make absinthe. If memory serves me correctly, the internet is a great source of guidance to those who wish to make absinthe de la maison. Vodka is required.

I have greatly enjoyed the gentle absinthe available in Australia, purged as it is of psychotic and hallucinogenic ingredients. The Symboliste poet lurking in the lower cerebellum is coaxed out hiding – one blusters with dreamy Baudelairean eloquence and yet one’s inner psychopath stays under lock and key. My one experience drinking the real deal absinthe in the Czech Republic, on the other hand, had somewhat dire consequences: a lengthy argument of the blazing variety devoted to the relative merits of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, conducted over several hours in a public square, several lost hours, mysterious bruises, a sore throat, and, of course, an almighty hangover dredged from one of the more fetid levels of hell. Just in case my dear grandfather is shaking his head in concern and wonder at such depravity in one just past the heyday of her youth, I note that I do not know anyone who has consumed absinthe in the Czech Republic. without such dire consequences. I will hopefully be happily in the C. R. in the next few months and this will give me the opportunity to consider whether I want to sample the fearsome genuine article once more, albeit with care. As a dilettante scholar of literary Modernism, I do consider it my professional duty to investigate such matters. Fear not, I shall treat the green fairy with extreme prejudice.

Le grog sauvage

Juniper, the berries of which are vital ingredient of that most vital spirit, the gin of my heart and dreams, grows wild on the hills and plains of the Cantal. I have been avidly reading through a library of books on wild foods and la cuisine sauvage and so am overburdened with botanical lore. The remarkable powers of the juniper tree (ahem, Juniperus communis) are lauded by folklorists, particularly those averse to the supernatural. Juniper branches hung over doors and windows on May Eve repel witches; smoke from a juniper fire keeps demons at bay. An infusion made from juniper berries apparently restores lost youth. To dream of a juniper tree is bad luck but, oddly, to dream of juniper berries signifies coming success. The herbals proffered no information as to the significance of dreams of gin.
After lunch chez Roselyne, a hoary organic old chestnut who deserves but probably won’t get a post of her own, I decided to walk home to la Bastide and was duly charged with the collection of juniper berries. Life would truly have exceeded art had the juniper berries been solicited in order to produce organic gin du maison. They were in fact picked for the enhancement of the pâté and terrines du maison made later in the week.

To access the bright blue berries of the juniper (which ripen only in their second year on the bush), one must negotiate some tough and spiky leaves. Picking juniper berries is more taxing than drinking a gin and tonic in the late afternoon, to this I can attest. Berried picked, fingers pricked, I found myself terribly lost in the forest. My orienteering skills never were that crash-hot. I was charmed by the deer I saw leaping through the trees – such charm! – until I stumbled over a sign which designated the area a hunting reserve and had a strong and unpleasant sense of myself as a moving target. Oh là là… Clambering, trampling, muttering, sliding, swearing, deep-breathing, back-tracking and clear-headed focus were required to get me home. In spite of the trying circumstances, not one juniper berry was lost.

Destination: Dessert

I have been a little wary of giving too much attention to old favourites in Paris on the grounds that Paris 2002-3 = le long gone and Paris 2007 = le now. Testament to this is the fact that my former favourite bar in Paris, La Patache, which was conveniently located on the ground floor of my apartment building on rue de Lancry, has changed hands and thus changed. Alas. (Nerdly aside: If books were written on my favourite places in Paris, Fisher Library would categorise them under the subject heading De la Rue, Trixie -- Homes and Haunts -- Paris. Someone, please, write a book and make it so.) This said, it was never really in question whether I would return to Le Cannibale, a very, very fine bar on the rue J-P Timbaud in the 20th arrondissement. It boasts lamps made from superannuated concertinas and over the bar hangs a great Goya-esque painting of a demon apparently eating a child. The ceilings are vaulted and hold up dim chandeliers; candlewax drips in the window-sills; there are big mirrors in gilded frames on the walls and the clientele reflected in them is, happily, the anti-chi chi – at least by over-groomed Parisian standards. The bar staff look like they have been flown in from Berlin and should actually be plotting artistic upheaval somewhere else; miraculously, they are quite sympa as well.

Le Cannibale is a bar, so you can drink whatever you want there, a good thing, in my opinion. It’s a bar in Paris, so you can also eat there. In fact, the food is entirely excellent, and the cheese and charcuterie plates alone constitute a reason to visit. Admittedly, nuestros amigos españols have got bar food sorted out in the form of tapas and pinchos. Still, I’m mighty partial to the assiettes de fromage et de charcuterie. A few slabs of pungent cheese and some bread on a plate are indisputably superior to chips and wedges and stodgy spring rolls and so on. Same goes for a board arrayed with slices of pâté and terrine, a dose of good old saucisson ancien (with apologies for the tautology) and some cornichons? Fingers crossed that by the time I return to Sydney, cheese and/or charcuterie plates will be standard bar tucker. Unlikely, methinks.

So, to recap, everything thus mentioned about le Cannibale – the décor, the staff, the location, the booze, the food – is generally excellent. The desserts, on the other hand, are just too fabulous for words; mere superlatives do not suffice. I had mentally stamped Le Cannibale in my mind as a Great Place for Desserts and would not have coped well with disappointment. Happily, memory did not deceive me. Le Cannibale is where I first encountered le marquis au chocolat, a truly extraordinary dessert. If I have never cooked a marquis au chocolat for you, hassle me to do so when I’m next in a kitchen near you, although bear in mind that French Chefs Do It Better (but only because they have better butter and cream). It is a little like… a mousse without the egg whites? A solid buttery chocolate custard? A really really rich brownie without the flour? I ate many desserts here which left serious impressions – the benchmark tarte tatin, a crème brûlée aux poires, lots of Berthillon icecream... This time around, there was no marquis au chocolat, but there was a fondant au chocolat meringué, that is, a melting chocolate cake with chocolate meringue baked on top.The pepperminty crème anglaise did get a little skewed in the transition from waitress to table. It would be churlish to deduct marks for presentation, particularly as the ripples were at least a third my fault, and even if I did, this would still be a perfect dessert. It was a flourless chocolate cake that I was disinclined to share, floating in the kind of custard that soothes all ills, I gasped, but I’ll swear on Finnegans Wake, I did not hallucinate: it was real.

Right at the beginning of the meal that terminated in this magnificent dessert, a round of kir was ordered. We were more than three, but three kirs nonetheless found themselves before a grainy Marc.

The inevitable cry resounded, ‘Three Kirs for Marc!’
I echo the cry, ‘Three Kirs for Le Cannibale!’

Two Margaritas

My arrival in Hanoi was not as smooth as I might have liked. My flight from Danang was delayed by three hours. The hotel who had promised to pick me up from the airport didn’t show. I arrived at the hotel at 11pm and they didn’t have a room for me. They did, however, have a room at their ‘sister’ hotel. The sister hotel was being renovated such that whilst water and power were in dubious supply, loud drilling noise and dust were in constant supply. And I had to fight for the privilege of leaving the next morning. I re-established myself eventually but my good humour was rattled.

Every guide to Saigon speaks of the wooonderful colonial hotels which have just faaaabulous interiors and bars which don’t just serve drinks, but are historically significant in and of themselves. Having installed myself just down the road from the Rex, apparently famous for having hosted American brass during the war, I betook myself to the rooftop cocktail bar for a drink, well-earned, in my opinion, and a snack. I found, to my disappointment, that the heyday of the Rex had passed. I should have known: any bar in Vietnam which has bratwurst on the bar snacks menu is a little suspect. The sound of ice against cocktail shaker cheered me no end and I could have drunk fourteen more margaritas but still… even with a fibreglass elephant in the background, this was not the post-colonial drink of my dreams.

Fast forward to my last night in Saigon. I had a plan and that plan was to eat at a swanky Vietnamese haute cuisine type number. Everything else in Saigon is shut on a Monday night and so was dinner option number one. Fortunately, I had been tramping around town all day and so had scoped out the B-List. Somehow, and I fear this is not entirely to my credit, I wound up spending my last night in South East Asia on a Tex-Mex jamboree. Plenty of time for breakfast pho and swanky Viet-lunch tomorrow.

Anyway, La Cantina screamed Tourist! Expat! Margarita! When I arrived, I was the only one in the restaurant upstairs. Orange couches, no small talk. My entirely excellent margarita arrived fast and so did tortilla chips and loads of salsa loaded with onion and garlic. I had a pang of Newtown nostalgia when the baby burrito, all cheese and beans, hit the table with a hearty, wholesome, leaden thump. Is Guzman y Gomez licensed yet? And why not? All that place needs is a few more tables and readily available Coronas and margaritas. Back to HCMC. I had vetoed sushi as a dinner option earlier in the evening on the grounds that raw fish on the eve of a long haul flight is not a good idea. This sensible approach fell by the wayside when I was faced with ceviche on the menu. Glorious, glorious, ceviche! And jalapenos, in this land of birds-eye chillies! Of course this warranted another margarita. Note that the martini glass full of ceviche is smaller than the margarita glass full of margarita.

I got excited by my coaster and took a picture of it. Instead of treating me like the crackpot who takes photos of coasters, as she would have been entitled to, the waitress brought me a box of coasters to go. Splendid.

As I soaked up my margarita, I realised that there is a nexus between Tex-Mex food and Vietnamese food. The marvellous combination of lime, tomato, coriander, onion and chilli (with or without coconut) shared by the two cuisines mandates all culinary intersections. Whensoever I should make my way to Mexico, I pledge to eat Vietnamese food. And drink margaritas.

Leaving Las Laos

This is the Hmong street market which bustles up a storm every night in Luang Prabang.

This is what a chi-chi bar looks like in LP, a stone's throw from the mercado above. This one is operated by Frenchies civilised and business savvy enough to know the merits of discounting cocktail hour.

Et voilà.

No incommodality

Should my mortal form be less than ineluctable, should my immaterial side have to face up to the murky business of metempsychosis, I think I could cope with safe passage into the body of a Mekong catfish. This, hounds and harlots, is how I passed much of Bloomsday.

Of course, today, it’s back to the grind. And enough with the Joyce references.

A regression only if we are speaking alphabetically

Significant news, chaps. Steel yourselves. Faced with this beastly tropical heat, I have been finding myself disinclined to drink martinis. In fact, to lay it bare, gin without tonic and loads of ice is a bit much for me to handle in this dashed climate. I’ve ordered a couple of martinis along the way but they have all turned tepid far too quickly. As we all know, apart from a hefty dose of alcohol, there is very little to recommend a warm martini of any variety. With or without an olive, shaken or stirred, wet or dry, clean or dirty, no matter how you mix them, martinis should not be served at room temperature, nor should they be consumed at blood temperature.

I have instead developed quite a taste for the margarita, a drink far more suited to the climate. Until not so long ago, being a little suspicious of tequila, I had characterised margaritas as a drink most suitable for squeal-ridden hen’s nights and had openly scoffed at the concept of the pre-made margarita slushy as – forgive me – a plebeian drink. In my ignorance, I equated margaritas with shonky Tex-Mex paraphernalia and its symptoms: stodgy nachos, sombreros, cacti, paunchy blokes, gluey burritos, bad Mexican accents, the shedding of inhibitions better kept intact, frosted blondes, regrettable dance floor scenes induced by even more regrettable tequila slammers and so on. You all know what I’m talking about.

In spite of all this, at some point during 2006, I became interested in both tequila and margaritas; I found myself suddenly able to appreciate the glorious synergy of tequila, lemon, and salt. Wise and wizened as I am now, living the starspangled dream of my new Twenties, I find the margarita to be an excellent cocktail for the tropics. Gin Fizz, Gin Schmizz; Mai Tai, Schmai Tai. Tequila is tremendously enlivening; lemon girds the immune system and protects against scurvy; salt replenishes electrolytes shed all too easily in the heat.

I arrived in Vientiane after a mighty long bus trip and was overcome with the desire for a margarita, so much so that I darkened the doors of an establishment called, wait for it, Tex-Mex Alexia, in order to satisfy my craving. The proprietors were no doubt laughing on the inside when they named their bar after a CNS disorder that causes the loss of ability to read. Hmmm, I wondered, is that a cactus I see struggling to maintain its dignity on the bar, or is it some straggly indigenous succulent previously unknown to me? The exposed clay detail on the bar, no doubt designed to take me back to my adobe hacienda, was pasted on, not entirely successfully. Kenny and Dolly were singing to each other overhead. These, my friends, are the perils of being a single woman fixated on a single drink. You find yourself alone in very dodgy bars in cities like Vientiane where there is no-one to call for company. It wasn’t till after I’d ordered my drink that I realised that I was in what seemed to be a girly bar. By that, I mean that I was the only girl paying for her own drink, and indeed the only girl not getting paid. Sigh.

What I’m discovering, however, is that the margarita is a very forgiving drink. By that I mean when I drink them, I can forgive a scene as sketchy as Kellett Lane at four on a Sunday morning, I can forgive décor as appealing as the Broadway carpark, and I can forgive a barman even klutzier than I am. Unlike many cocktails, provided all the basic ingredients make their way into or onto the glass, margaritas are hard to mess up. If your margarita is a bit warm, the lemon and salt cool things down. If it comes with ice, the tequila can soak up the melt. If it’s too strong, balancing the glass is a nice distraction. If one ingredient is poured with a heavy hand, it’s no problem as both tequila and triple sec (or cointreau or blue curacao or whatever) are palatable enough straight. Even the dodgiest bars just fade into the backdrop as you consider the niceties of the margarita in the abstract and the niceness of the margarita in your hand. Once I find myself in a cooler climate possessed of more powerful refrigeration systems it is likely that I’ll return to the chilly embrace of the martini but for now, amigos guapitos, cansámos juntos, Viva! Viva La Margarita!

Beers of Myanmar

I may be way out of line in making this claim and if so, I will happily be corrected. Nonetheless, I venture forth. I do declare that I have sampled no less than THREE beers which have not sullied the palate of my good friend Fil of the Czechlands, a man who has tasted more beers than anyone else I know, a man who has traversed continents in pursuit of an elusive new drop, a man who has diligently recorded the attributes of many thousands of beers. To the fund of common knowledge, I humbly present the following, available, I believe, only in Myanmar.

a) Myanmar Lager.

This is the standard Myanmar beer, available everywhere and bottled by the good ol’ Myanmar government. Hoppity hoppy lager. It’s the top-shelf beer in this country, being twice the price of the Mandalay Strong Ale and Lager. Much better cool than warm.

b) Mandalay Strong Ale.
This ale is reasonably punchy, I must say. 7% alcohol content, a little bitter, very pubby. It’s a little bit rough around the edges: a big gulp makes me wince and can bring tears to my eyes. Myanmar is a country in which you can legitimately lay claim to a hard-earned thirst after about thirty seconds. You can get it spotting a stupa, you can get it in a sun struck stupor, you can get it dodging a cow, matter of fact…etc etc. In such situations, I prescribe Mandalay Strong Ale!

c) Spirulina Beer.

The ads for Spirulina Beer show a glass full of dark green liquid. Fortunately this is not the case when it is poured out of the bottle. The beer is not undrinkable nor is it very good. The label declares that it is an anti-ageing drink which will help the drinker stay young forever, presumably due to the spirulina. I’ve given pretty short shrift to the health-giving claims made about spirulina. I think with Spirulina Beer, we have another snake oil situation and it’s all revealed in the fine print. This beer has 0.5% spirulina content and 5% alcohol content. That means there is TEN TIMES more alcohol in this beer than spirulina. If Myanmar had a Trade Practices Act with provisions about misleading claims, this would surely violate it. Hang on, there’s more fine print to be read. Spirulina Beer is brewed by the Myanmar Ministry of Industries and hence could probably claim to take you to the moon and back without getting into strife.

There are plenty of draught beers available as well – Dagon, ABC (‘An Easy Beer’), and my personal favourite, SKOL (‘It means Cheers.’). These are served in beer stations, sites of homosocial exchange if ever there were. Blokes, sitting around, drinking beer, smoking cheroots, chewing betel leaf, and apparently singing karaoke late at night. There’s definitely a ‘No Sheilas’ vibe to beer station culture. I didn’t see any women in the beer stations after about seven at night, and certainly no foreign women ALONE. This particular anti-patriarchal battle was one that I could not fight on my own. I did, however, spend a fairly boozy final night in Yangon in a beer station with a transient who I met on the bus. I was the only woman in the joint and nowhere was there a facility resembling a ladies’ loo or a loo that could be used by a lady. Had I the words ‘woman of extremely loose morals’ tattooed across my forehead in Burmese (don’t worry, Poppy, I don’t), I don’t think the looks and leers directed my way when we left would have been very different.