A little while ago our lovely friends John and Helen Kiff surprised us with a gift of 500,000 VND with instructions to treat ourselves to a hotel upgrade/swanky meal out or whatever treat took our fancy.

After some deliberation on what to do with our new found wealth we eventually decided to use it on a night out on the town to celebrate moving into our new house in Hoi An. What a lovely night we had!

We got all dressed up, Andy even wore a shirt, and we started the evening with a pleasant stroll into town.

Our first port of call was to be River Lounge, a very fancy restaurant/cocktail bar on the edge of the river in the old town.

We spent an hour or so relaxing in their ‘beach’ area sipping mojitos and enjoying the scenery.

Hoi An is a very pretty town. There are lanterns everywhere which light the streets like a magical techni-coloured dream. The protected Old Town is a unique mix of Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and European architecture and it’s beautiful old ocre coloured buildings line the riverfront.

Housed in one of these buildings was our chosen restaurant for the evening, the aptly named Café Des Amis (-that’s Friends’ Cafe Ade).

This is quite an unusual restaurant, with a very good reputation in Hoi An. There is no menu. You simply choose either meat, fish or vegetarian and then wait to see what arrives. Each night it’s a new menu of 5 courses (!) with all dishes being creations of the owner Mr Nguyen Manh Kim. They’re all essentially Vietnamese style things, but put together in a different way to the standard dishes you get everywhere else.

I get the impression Mr Nguyen is something of a character. Rather than cooking the food for the evening, once he’s invented it and passed on the instructions to staff he then spends the rest of the night hanging around the restaurant chatting to people, showing you how to eat the food and if you’re not eating enough/quickly he’ll come and start putting more on your plate gesturing you to keep eating. We were stuffed! Definitely don’t eat all day if you plan on going.

So what was on the menu? We started with a plate of circles of a sort of steamed white dough topped with crispy fried Cau Lau.

Cau Lau is the local speciality noodle. The recipe is a secret and it is only made by one family in the area (I wonder if it’s the Nguyens – 40% of Vietnamese have this surname!). Cau Lau is usually served in it’s non-fried form in a similar way to other noodle street food – in a bowl as a simple meal with a few herbs, chili, and thin sliced meat. So this fried version is pretty unusual. Mr Nguyen came and showed us that we should scoop up on of the circles and top it with a good dollop of chili sauce before eating. It was a bit like a spicy crunchy scallop. Yum!

Next on the menu was a huge plate of crispy spring rolls:

Quickly followed by a curried pumpkin and coconut milk soup with wanton. Mr Nguyen first broke pieces of the wanton into our bowls, then topped them with soup. This is a great idea. The crispy bits were a top addition to the soup.

By this stage we were already stuffed! Nevertheless another plate full of food soon arrived. This time spicy vegetables and noodles, again topped with the crispy Cau Lau – he’d gone a bit crazy on them that night! Part way through this course I got told off for not eating enough and he piled another spring roll into my dish. I like this guy. It may sound like he could almost be quite annoying in a “Just let me get on with my meal” kind of a way, but he has a good way about him so it’s all quite funny and you can tell he only wants you to eat more because he is proud of the food.

We ended the meal with a small(thankfully!) creme caramel a couple of beers and a good chat with a couple of lads on the next table who had also just been enjoying working their way through the mammoth meal. They were in Hoi An for a couple of days as part of their travels around South East Asia during which they were having fun taking videos of each other eating weird food. Ha! Sounds like a great idea, there’s certainly enough of it on offer. Really nice lads, shame they weren’t staying longer.

After the restaurant we waddled off back towards our lovely new apartment via a couple of bars and over a few more beers formulated our plans for revolution. Well maybe not quite but we did have a good old rant abut things. So all in all we did have a really lovely evening, great food, good chats and all in such a beautiful setting. So thank you very much to John and Helen for your lovely surprise gift. It was really a treat to be able to have a guilt free splash out on a great night out on the town! Thanks! x