In the heart of Chinatown, this restaurant serves a variety of Vietnamese dishes for lunch and dinner. Clientele are predominantly tourists.
User Reviews
Hung from London
Oct 19, 2014
Best Pho outside Vietnam.
The Pho beef noodle soup are similar to back in Vietnam which are so smooth and silky that goes nicely down the throat with the soup, very appetising with added chilli and lime. Most places use dried instant flat rice noodles for convenient due to limited resources outside Vietnam which are very chewy and rough, since most places uses this dried instant noodles, people will become to mistaken that's what real Pho are like.
The beef are very fresh and thinly slice so if you like it well done all is needed is to push them down into the hot soup with the chopstick.
My friend and 3 small children visited and were told by the waiter that we had to spend at least ten pounds on each child. as most things on the menu were less than 10 pounds this seemed very unfair and so we left and went to child friendly restaurant!
I have visted this restaurant many times over the last few years and I really like it. Service is fast, the food comes quickly, portions are large, and the food is delicious. I know that the restaurant has a high number of happy, regular customers and i simply do not accept the negative reviews written by certain people.
I have been a regular customer of this restaurant since it was openned more than 20 years ago, it's still in business speaks for itself since it in a location of crazily expensive rent and business rate. It's a small family run business, the family comes from Vietnam, most Vietnamese people can speak Cantonese as well.
I keep on going back because the food is great, especially their Pho noodles are freshly made noodles, unlike most other Vietnamese restaurants using dried instant Pho noodles. Every time I go, I ate and drunk to the last drop of the Pho noodles and broth. You need to add some green chilli, sweet basils and squeze in the lime provided with it to get the best out of it. Yummy!
There are other specialities I also like, such as the Summer rolls, it's got a choice of pork, beef and Prawn, I like the Beef rolls while my wife loves the prawn rolls. Their dry noodles (bun) I think thats what they called it, is really nice, it's has rice vermicelli noodles topped with salads and BBQ meat or prawn with lemon grass toppings served with their specially prepared fish sauce, there is a choice of cold or hot noodles, I find cold noodles taste better because of the contrast of the hot BBQ toppings and the cold noodle with the salads. I usually ordered a Vietnamese spring roll or BBQ prawns on the side which are also nice.
The above are just simple dishes which I find the price very reasonable in such an expensive location of town. There are more special dishes which are also really nice but needs a bit work such as self rolled rice paper dishes which you need to use you hand, my favourite are the seafood rice paper rolls and the BBQ fish rolls. I usually have the simple dishes but when I have friends and family together, I order the simple dishes to share as a start and the special dishes for mains, this way we can share and sample more variety.
If you like spicy vegetables, the Morning Glory in spicy prawn sauce is very nice.
i love this place, a freind of mine who had lived in Vietnam reccomended and i have been going ever since. the food is cheap and cheerful tasty street type food, my fave morning glory with galic and chilli, pork rice, salty squid and pork hot noodles, love this place a great find in an increasingly expensive and homogenised london. Fabulous.
I am a food geek in China,this is my first time to have the Vietnamese food in Chinatown.
The food was fantastica for me. I love the beef noodle soup,frog legs,fried spring tools and pork chop on rice. It is about 25 pounds for the meal. The broth was very very good,the best broth I have tried before. Now I am in China now,I recommend it to my friends to take it when they are in London.
I'm vietnamese and it was my first time at this restaurant and also the last time. I visited it with a vietnamese friend and we both ordered a quite typical and common vietnamese dish and were very disappointed because it was far from vietnamese food, it did not taste of vietnamese, not a jot and it was disgusting! - it was cooked by Chinese and the restaurant was also run by Chinese. They do not have any idea of vietnamese food! I'm angry and it is frustrating that they discredit vietnamese food.
The service was terrible, unfriendly and bothersome as well as has tried to shortchange us.
It is definitely not a vietnamese restaurant and I would not recommend it, not at all!
This was my first time at this restaurant and also be my last. The staff did not clearly understood my orders. I asked for my beanspouts to be cooked eith my pho (rice flat noodles) and he said they are cooked in the soup, which clearly wasn't as he just place raw ones on the plate. I also CLEARLY ORDERED CHICKEN SKWERED but not knowing he would give me something wrong so I took the first bite. Then realised the meat was a little on the dark side so asked, what meat it was. He said beef!! I am allergic to beef and came home with a rash on my face and body. They may not understand fully English but I spoke to the staff in CANTONESE and he replied to me back saying yes yes ok ok. Which clearly show my orders were wrong. I am very upset with their service and hope others will not go through the same.
We are a mature couple from Australia. We regularly eat at Cabramatta, a Vietnamese suburb of Sydney and at the Vietnamese restauants near Sydney's chinatown district where Xic Lo is excellent for soups.
We wanted to see if this London restaurant could be similar. We found the food to be almost there but it was let down by the wait staff. It could be that they were too busy. When discussing our order we had to find out what size the serving portions are. As part of that a chicken dish was mentioned. In our opinion we had rejected that in favour of a vegetables and rice dish. The chicken dish was delivered to the table. The lesson is to reconfirm the order before the waiter leaves your table.
Apparently there is a service charge automagically attached to your bill "It's on the menu for you to see."
We ordered summer rolls - 1 each. Well presented, 2 prawns in each but too much rice noodle in the filling.
The thin sliced beef soup with garnishes looked the part. The first taste of the soup was that the flavour was less compared to Xic Lo. The flavour became flatter, even dull, half way through. I'm sure this can be remedied so that the flavour is still alive at the end.
