THE girl on the telephone might well have been in Indochina. The cacophony behind her surely came not from a classy restaurant, a place to lie back in wicker chairs under whirring ceiling fans, but from peak time at a Da Nang fish market. ''I'm sorry, butwe are full on Saturday evening.'' She was shouting above the din. ''I'm sorry, but we are full on Friday evening. We could fit you in at lunchtime.'' Fit us in? Fitting in is something dentists do to people with toothache. Indochine, talk of the town, was not going to be fun.
But the nice thing about cynicism is that once in a while a slave to it can be pleasantly surprised. Indochine is not an affected place serving invented dishes from a region made fashionable by Oliver Stone and Catherine Deneuve. It is not particularly expensive - although it is far from cheap - and it does not have conical straw hats hanging from every wall. Closed minds are designed to be opened a little and for once the advance publicity, at least the bits of it that I had heard, had not done a place justice.
Indochine - Indochine 1929 to give it its proper name for the record - is less thematically hamstrung as it might have been. The waitresses do wear ao dai, but there can be no complaints about that. In fact I can only feel admiration for a nation that can turn a nylon bed sheet with a hole at each end into a sexier outfit than has ever graced the body of any overpaid catwalk clothes-horse.
In deference to political correctness, the men were all pretty well turned out too, in linen waistcoats. There are no ceiling fans, just cream walls, shuttered windows along two sides and generally unobtrusive decoration; ecru lampshades, linen tablecloths and plain, stone tableware. Quiet French music, no oversized candlesticks and no plastic foliage.
Wine is expensive in restaurants and Indochine is sadly no exception. The argument is a purely economic one - this is where these places make a great deal of their money.
It's hard to argue with spreadsheets, but what makes it such a bitter pill is that there are no half bottles, no half-litre carafes of economical but effective plonk, and in the company of virtual teetotallers a bottle seems extravagant. That said, Indochine is the kind of place where you can get nicely relaxed and not have to suffer looks of contempt from maitre d's whose dickie bows prevent them from relaxing their necks to the extent God intended.