Tale of a Gustatory Challenge – Kava anyone? BY DAVIN DE KERGOMMEAUX
In this edition of our magazine, Davin brings us on yet another fascinating journey into something completely different. Read on for a hilarious, make you squirm in your seat adventure!
somewhere in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean
It was somewhere in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean that I began to regret boasting about my adventurous palate. My travelling companion, Andy Walston, had triggered my spidey sense when we were checking into the Melanesian Hotel in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila. His fleeting grin as he suggested we skip the hotel’s tourist-friendly buffet and have dinner nearby at L’houstalet Restaurant suddenly made me nervous. With his gently malicious sense of humour, Andy had playfully been mocking my tall tales of wine with snakes in the bottle and Cambodian restaurants that served tarantula meat. Still, he had offered to help me track down a mystical local specialty: the muscle-relaxing juice of a plant called kava. And, kava it would be, but now it worried me that before setting out on that quest, he might try to up the ante and make my medallion of spider story seem tame. To my surprise, L’houstalet turned out not to be some exotic local wonder but as authentic a French restaurant as you could find in the tropical South Pacific. However, among the escalopes, filets and rognons was a dish I did not recognize – “civet de roussette.” He had been waiting for this moment. “Flying fox,” he mumbled, a little too nonchalantly. “They serve fox??” I gasped. “They’re really just bats,” he replied, not lifting
his gaze from the menu. Bats. How comforting. And just like that, Andy had trumped my fried spider with bat stew.
Images of death by rabies aside, I could not overcome my queasiness about dining on bat meat. True, in the days before smartphones and laptops, you never knew what unforeseen adventures awaited when visiting remote places such as this, but bats for dinner? Little did I know what Vanuatu would pass between my lips before this visit was through. When we met in the lobby the next morning, Andy had found someone to drive us to a remote village for a traditional kava ceremony. Young and old, squatting on their heels, waited to receive us, leaping to their feet each time a ripe coconut fell from a tree, hitting the ground with a cracking thud. Soon, their final guest, a doctor there on vacation arrived and off we set on foot into the jungle. A pack of dogs followed, breaking into ones and twos to race ahead as we approached a clearing where billowing aromas of roasting wild boar beckoned us. As guests of honour, we were seated on the smoothest lumpy rocks and logs and handed folded banana leaves filled with roast pork and a vegetable paste called laplap.
As guests of honour, we were seated on the smoothest lumpy rocks and logs and handed folded banana leaves filled with roast pork and a vegetable paste called laplap.
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the whisky explorer magazine
FALL 2024
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