Le Silapa Restaurant by Robin Hanbury-Tenison

Food in South East Asia is fine. We all enjoy the varieties of sticky rice, fish mousse, stuffed bamboo shoots or lemon grass, but occasionally one feels like a familiar blow-out. The options, which are succumbed to all too often by the usual herd of backpackers, group tourists and independent travellers alike, are pizzas, hamburgers and western delicatessens.

This is all fine, but there is a feeling that they shouldn’t really be there. After all, if you’re going to eat that sort of food, why go to the Far East? So, most of us stick to the local food most of the time and, mostly, its OK, occasionally superb and one has a glimpse of what oriental food really should taste like. I’ve eaten Chinese, Malay, Vietnamese and other Indochinese food best not in restaurants but from market stalls and it can be extraordinarily exciting at times.

However, just occasionally we all feel the need for the best of our own culture when far from home, as nothing is more comforting when you are feeling lonely, and usually this is an unattainable dream. If you go to seek it in the new tarted up smartest international hotels, you will nearly always be disappointed. Only at the very best, like the Mandarin and the Peninsular, which do not have branches in the boondocks, will you find the real thing. Recently, I came across an exception which proves the rule.

In Vientiane, the hick, newish capital of Laos, a place you are either stuck in because it is the capital, or because you are passing through on your way to the much more interesting old capital of Luang Prabang and points north, I was directed to Le Silapa. This is an unashamedly top class French restaurant, which could hold its own in Paris; no mean feat when the ingredients have to be found locally if they are to be fresh.

I started with a shrimp dish, which electrified me. Suddenly I was experiencing familiar taste sensations, so different from the interesting but unfamiliar flavours of the orient. The shrimps melted in my mouth, the shallots and basil were sharp on the tongue and the sauce was so good I mopped up every drop with the ample fresh French bread provided. Rack of lamb with a rosemary and garlic confit was a noble successor. The meat was tender and pink, the vegetables unobtrusive and just right to accompany each special mouthful. Again I licked my platter clean.

Just for fun, I had a crème brulee; straight, not the exotic alternative also on offer. It was as good and honest as that served at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where I believe it was invented.

The wines, too, were, good and true (and incredibly cheap); a clean, tasty Sauvignon and a decent Muscat, both at US$10. I have seldom left a restaurant feeling better fed and wined – and this in Laos!

Please patronise Le Silapa if you are passing through Vientiane, if only because a substantial part of all you spend goes to a medical fund for disadvantaged children. Why, oh why, are there not more people with the intelligence and passion to create places like this? Five of us drank three bottles of wine and dined superbly for barely $100.