Sometimes I should remain silent. Last week I dared myself into writing a diary based entirely on my remembering the cuisine served in a Vietnamese eatery I frequented during the late seventies in Sydney: a culinary remembrance of sorts, and a challenge to having to rely on my sputtering cerebellum and the questionably fuzzy area of the gray matter surrounding it.
Surely, I thought to myself, if I can remember pilfering my father's cache of goat cheese at age three, this ought to be a snack....and in a sense, it is, thanks to the Vietnamese clean, tasty and healthy cuisine, with its abundance of fresh herbs, pungent broths, and their use of vegetables as meat gets relegated to a condiment rather than the main act.
Conjuring up those memories and the wonderful smells in my writing room, currently in the rural west of Eire, my mind wanders to 1977 and in no time (pun intended) I am sitting in the tiny upstairs dining room of this now long gone but not forgotten eatery. The room is sparsely furnished, twelve to fourteen disparate chairs, crisp, floral linen carefully stretched out onto each of the four tables, a small window overlooking a busy Oxford Street, three small Oriental wooden etchings displayed in an ascending angle towards the ceiling, and a lonely palm tree standing guard by the stairs. Calm, unassuming and a perfect setting for eating on a quiet Sunday night with family and friends.
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