MASTERCHEF STAR THUY HOANG NAMES LONDON’S BEST VIETNAMESE RESTAURANTS
TV Chef and Vietnamese Food Expert Shares Ultimate Guide to London’s Top Vietnamese Spots
Thuy Hoang is one of the UK’s leading voices on Vietnamese cuisine, and she’s gone on a delicious quest around London to bring Time Well Spent readers the ultimate guide to its best Vietnamese dining.
Thuy shot to fame after becoming a quarter finalist on BBC’s MasterChef last year, and is a regular on the UK food festival circuit, giving cooking demos.
She has also taught at leading cookery schools, provides recipes for magazines and has served as judge at assorted food industry awards, from Great Taste Awards to the Great British Food Awards.
Check out Thuy’s Vietnamese cookery channel here www.youtube.com/@thuycooks
And find out more on her Instagram at @thuycooks
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As a British-Vietnamese, I am often asked where I eat out in London - many people do not appreciate the great variety in Vietnamese cuisine.
Vietnamese food is unique, with China and India's influences across its borders and a French colonial past of nearly 100 years.
The cuisine includes street food, as well as distinct regional dishes, with fiercely defended distinctions between North and South. After the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese families, like mine, settled in the UK, and they brought and nurtured their cuisine to hold onto their culture.
Some set up restaurants and this has produced an exciting variety of dining experiences, from café style to fine dining.
In practice, it is impossible to pick a single, leading Vietnamese restaurant in London, as there is so much choice, quality and variety.
However, these are my four top picks, all very different, and giving insight into London's flourishing Vietnamese food scene.
Eat Vietnam
Eat Vietnam co-owner, Shelly says: “We’d never move from this part of London as we’re at the heart of a community of Vietnamese people who’ve settled here. Our chefs live locally and 60% of our customers are Vietnamese.”
A hub of the London Vietnamese community, the restaurant's ambience is intimate and cosy.
It's a family-run business owned by husband-and-wife team, Bình Lê and wife Shelly. Everybody is involved in serving delicious, authentic fare from the Vietnamese Midlands and South with recipes sourced from Shelly’s mother and mother-in-law.
The dishes are superb in taste and presentation, so Eat Vietnam's success sine since it opened 8 years ago is unsurprising - the family have recently acquired another property just a few yards away on Evelyn Street (open from Thursdays to Sundays).
Stand-out starters include their juicy quails marinated in lemon grass - the perfume of the lemongrass and the charcoal from their BBQ firing is outstanding - and their mini coconut pancakes with prawns (“bánh khọt”).
You should approach these little pancakes the Vietnamese way wrapped in a lettuce leaf with herbs and carrot pickle, then dip them in their fish sauce, which has the perfect balance of salinity, sweetness, heat and tanginess.
Their traditional, mains rice dish of shredded pork, grilled pork chops, meatloaf and pickles (“cơm sườn bì chả”) transported me promptly back to childhood in Saigon. It was my father’s favourite, but for breakfast.
Save room for the desserts too - I recommend the creamy sago tapioca dish with taro, mango and crushed ice.
Eat Vietnam, 234 Evelyn Street, Deptford, London SE8 5BZ
Hoa Sen
At the age of 14, Chef Patron Bình Nguyễn decided he needed a career and travelled from Hanoi to Hong Kong to start working in restaurant kitchens.
Bình became an expert in Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine and arrived in the UK in the 90s to help his fellow Vietnamese to start restaurant businesses.
His own restaurant now occupies a prime location in London’s Drury Lane, with enticing street food influences, cleverly fusing Vietnamese and Chinese cuisine.
He continues to travel extensively around Vietnam in search of culinary ideas. A recent discovery he showed be was the unusual spice (“hạt”), which is used on his unique, succulent Lạng Sơn roast duck.
I was treated to a fabulous new dish that will feature on a forthcoming menu - a beautifully poached, salted chicken with a glossy turmeric skin, paired with crunchy jelly fish for a contrasting texture.
Hoa Sen also has a wonderfully fresh papaya salad (“gỏi đu đủ bò khô”) laced with herbs and crowned with homemade beef brisket (Vietnamese jerky). It is divine and, for me, evocative of a dish from street food vendors in Saigon.
Other excellent dishes include their popular phở red wine beef stew (“phở bò kho”) flavoured with lemongrass, cinnamon, fennel and star anise. It's a nod to Vietnam’s French colonial period with phở a relative of France’s pot-au-feu. This is a luxurious consommé, into which the Vietnamese have added rice noodles, chilli, the perfume of herbs, and meats.
Bình simmers his stock for at least a day, and it is complex and flavoursome. My favourite dish, however, is the crispy bagbagis with tofu (“bún đậu lòng mắm tôm”). Bagbagis is deep fried pork intestine, which is most popular with Chinese and Vietnamese diners. It is served with crispy tofu chunks, vermicelli and a piquant shrimp paste. Perfection.
Hoa Sen, 22 Drury Lane, London WC2B 5RH
Phở Thúy Tây
Phở Thúy Tây is just a few steps from Surrey Quays London Overground station.
Its Chef Patron Thúy Nguyễn's parents ran a phở stand in Hanoi, and the restaurant opened in 2014 from her dissatisfaction with the authenticity of UK Vietnamese food.
This inception has translated into a comfortable, unpretentious, café-style eatery of unapologetic Northern Vietnamese cuisine.
An admirable aspect to Phở Thúy Tây is that - like Chef Bình at Hoa Sen - its Chef Patron, Thúy also travels to Vietnam frequently in search of inspiration.
The restaurant offers a good range of more familiar dishes, but also some for the boldly adventurous and open-minded.
Thúy gave me a sharing platter of green papaya salad; summer rolls containing prawns, noodles, fresh salad and herbs; delightfully crunchy spring rolls; crispy, deep-fried salt and pepper prawns; and my favourite, some deliciously moreish deep-fried tofu cubes in salted egg yolk.
From Thursdays to Sundays, Chef Thúy serves specials from freshly sourced ingredients depending on her inspiration at the time. Reassuringly, many of restaurant’s customers are Vietnamese.
There are dishes with eel, frog’s legs, and intestines among other ingredients. I chose a beautiful, tangy vermicelli soup of crab, pungent shrimp paste and tomato, paired with a snail patty (called “bún riêu cua chả óc”). This is scarcely seen on Vietnamese restaurant menus in the UK. Everything is homemade so, if you are feeling adventurous, do give the dishes a try.
Also on offer is an unctuous bowl of Northern-style beef phở, made to Thuý’s family recipe. This takes approximately 20 hours to prepare. Fervently advocating for her Northern heritage, Thúy makes her own chilli sauce for this dish frowning at the Southern practice of adding of Hoisin sauce and Thai basil into the broth.
Phở Thúy Tây, 1B Rotherhithe Old Road, London SE16 2PP
Sông Quê Café
Kingsland Road, Shoreditch is home to numerous Vietnamese restaurants - standing proudly on a corner replete in bright green is Sông Quê Café.
This well-established, family-run business has drawn long queues since opening in 2002. My family has been regulars for many years, as its flavoursome Southern dishes are reminiscent of those from our lives in Saigon.
Sông Quê’s recipes come from the family’s matriarch and owner, Mrs. Ánh Phạm.
The menu is extensive, with excellent dishes including delectable, deep-fried squid with delightfully thin, crispy batter and a hint of spice; a refreshing green papaya salad with prawns balanced with the umami of its accompanying fish sauce; succulent charcoal-grilled lamb chops paired with zingy lime, salt and a pepper dipping sauce; and phở.
The meats in the phở include rare steak slices, flank, tendon, tripe and beef meatballs and it is garnished with fresh chili, lime, beansprouts and fragrant herbs. It is uncommon to find the dish served traditionally with tendon and tripe, so this is something I typically order when I visit.
Another dish I adored was the stewed, caramelised seabream, which Jeffrey recommended. This arrives at the table bubbling and the fish is cooked to perfection in its thick, caramelised sweet, salty sauce.
These four, very different restaurants show the wonderful variety and high quality of Vietnamese dining in London. All have substantial menus honouring authenticity and treasured family dishes. And their offerings hint at counterpart dishes in countries bordering Indochina, or to Vietnam’s long connection with France. This melting pot encapsulates the singularity and beauty of Vietnamese food - It has always been about borrowing, innovation, and creativity.
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