The next time I tried something adventurous, I found my favorite restaurant. I used to learn French at the Alliance Française in Dhaka. One day, out of curiosity, I visited a French restaurant in the city. To my surprise, there was one.
Around 2014, one of the most exclusive Japanese restaurants in town was Wasabi, It shared space with two less popular siblings – BellagioAnd Breath, As far as I know, these were the only true fine dining establishments in Dhaka at the time, serving European cuisine and dabbling in molecular gastronomy. My father and I first tried escargot—garden snails served in a buttery parsley sauce—at Breath,
it was magnificent. To avoid scalding our fingers on the hot balls, we took small round tongs for the dish. There were also small double-sided prongs to pull the snail from the protective coating. The snail itself was meaty, but the parsley butter made it soft and smooth, just as it would have been with any other sauce, like a fiery marinara or a silky béchamel.
When I told my mom about my new favorite restaurant, she was disappointed. Like any other Bengali mother her story too began at least a few miles away from its real point.