If you live in London you'll know this anyway but for those that don't East London, specifically Hackney, has a big Vietnamese community. If you go to Mare Street there's a couple of little shops and a vast Vietnamese supermarket, complete a fine selection of Vietnamese music and DVDs, but the bit that most people know (why would you go to Mare Street if you didn't live there?) is the mass of restaurants on the Hoxton end of Kingsland Road.
My favourite is Song Que, so when the girlfriend asked where I wanted her to take me to dinner that's where we headed. It may be big, busy, rushed and sometimes rude, but I love it for the simple fact that the list of pho - pronounced 'fuh' - is huge and I do love my noodle soup. For the uninitiated pho is a flat rice noodle soup, normally with some form of cow (ignoring the more commonly used beef on purpose) and a dark, rich broth. This comes in a big bowl and on the side you get beansprouts, herbs - holy basil, coriander and a big grass bladed one I don't know the name of, chillies and lime to alter the broth to your taste. In Sog Que you can get it with cooked flank, raw steak, tripe or tendon and any combination of the four. Being greedy and poor at decision making I tend to have them all which leaves you with a bowl full of flavour that also covers the whole gamut of textures: soft noodles and beef, crunchy beansprouts, springy tripe and gelatinous tendon all floating in a hot and sour broth.
Another must have is the Vietnamese Pancake starter, or Banh Xeo. A rice flour pancake, made with either water or coconut milk and coloured yellow with turmeric, fried till crisp and filled with a stir fry beansprouts, pork and prawns. The ubiquitous salty sharp Vietnamese dip, Nuoc Mam Cham, cuts through the oily pancake and filling. Beware this thing is rather large though, one is enough for two people, but in the name of this blog I did order another couple of starters to report on too. These were soft shell crab, crisp batter giving way to leathery soft shell and meaty middle, and prawn paste on sugarcane, springy prawn paste skewered on sweet, juicy sugarcane.
For main the girlfriend had a quite strange dish of cold rice vermicelli topped with barbecued pork, minced pork and chopped up pork spring rolls. Tasty but the rice vermicelli definitely needs the aofrementioned Nuoc Mam Cham to moisten and add zing. This was a lot of food for two really, but we managed to squeeze it down, all cooked very nicely and delivered promptly, possibly too promptly. Washed down with a couple of beers each it was no more then £20 a head, so great value if you can put up with the crowds and don't mind waiting a little while to be seated.
I still haven't sampled the Vietnamese delights of Kingsland Road. Shameful!
Posted by: Lizzie | January 23, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Shameful. Although with all the culinary delights south of the river you don't really need to travel up here do you?
Posted by: Joshua Armstrong | January 23, 2009 at 12:18 PM
How odd. Last night, I sat and went through an enormous pile of magazines that I'd kept with a view to cutting out and keeping various travel articles and recipes for future reference.
In one was a round-up of top restaurants in East London recommended by, erm, Peter Conran maybe? I forget.
Anyway, the first on their list was Song Que!
Posted by: Kavey | January 24, 2009 at 03:55 PM