Med Salleh Viet, Earl's Court

It's a funny old part of town is Earl's Court. Not quite Kensington, not quite Chelsea, not many reasons to visit (certainly not since the conference center/arena got pulled down), it's these days little more than a fairly ordinary provincial high street dumped in West London, with a few rubbish pubs and fast food joints and all of it too busy and noisy to be worth your while. You may have changed here to get to Heathrow from Clapham, you may conceivably have met some friends in one of the grotty Greene King pubs before going on somewhere better, but what you probably haven't done is travelled here on purpose.

And yet tucked around the back of the main drag, down some precarious steps underneath a terrace hotel, sits Med Salleh Viet, an actual bona fide reason to visit Earl's Court. It doesn't look like much at first, although some seasoned food-seekers may recall that Georgian terrace basement locations can host some real gems - think Roti King in Euston, or Blacklock in Soho. Inside, the space is functional but pleasant enough, and, we were pleased to discover, pretty well populated for a rainy Tuesday night - clearly amongst some people, the word is already out.

The evening began with a mango salad, perhaps not the most thorough test of a kitchen's ability, but it at least demonstrated that they knew how to balance the sour and sweet elements of cold Vietnamese dishes - sugar, vinegar, perhaps fish sauce but certainly chilli and lime juice all added up to a very satisfying whole. In fact I'd go so far as to say you should always order a salad (either mango, or papaya or banana blossom) in a Vietnamese restaurant in London - they never disappoint.

Things really kicked into gear though with the arrival of the chicken wings. Giant healthy looking things, with big thick bones and holding plenty of meat (just drumsticks here, no messing about with fiddly double-boned flats) they had a fantastic crunchy coating a bit like the salt and pepper style you sometimes see but these seemed that much more refined and complex. The sweet chilli dip (homemade I'm sure) they came with was the perfect foil for the salty marinade.

Whole grilled squid, sliced into tender, even rings, was dressed in an interesting earthy spice mix (sorry I'm a bit lost when it comes to Vietnamese spicing techniques, but I'm pretty sure there was five spice in there somewhere) and came with another lovely house sauce of vinegar and chilli.

I was never not going to order something calling itself "Pha Lau Bo - Assorted Beef Offal" and I'm happy to say this giant bowl of tripe, tendons, oxtail, tofu, mushrooms and god knows what else absolutely did not disappoint. My favourite element was the tripe, delicate little strips of spongy goodness that soaked up the stock and released heavenly bursts of rich beefy flavour in the mouth, but there was so much to enjoy here it's hard to know where to start. I should say though, that this bowl of presumably fairly cheap ingredients (albeit lovingly prepared) was £25, so is hardly an impulse purchase, but value is a theme I'll return to later.

Meantime, there was this steak bun cha to get through, sticky strips of chargrilled beef, smoky from the coals, on a bed of bouncy vermicelli noodles and with yet another different dip, this time dark soy and chilli amongst other things. As with everything else, it was generous of portion and flavour and accompanied by a bewildering variety of herbs, nuts and pickled vegetables, sending your palate in a hundred different directions at once like all the best Vietnamese food does.

Finally of the savoury courses, Fancy Pho - black truffle and wagyu in which excellent broth was poured over some superbly tender beef to gently poach it before it was ready to scoop up with more top notch noodles and enjoy. In all honesty I've never really rated wagyu above good beef from other sources, but maybe I'm just immune to its charms. I'm sure the Med Salleh rare beef pho (£16.90 as opposed to £29.90 for the wagyu) is very good too.

So yes, the prices. Despite the obvious high standard of cooking and sourcing (and service, although as per usual feel free to ignore this aspect as it was an invite) Med Salleh is not a budget operation. London is not Vietnam, and rents, staffing and ingredient costs are all conspiring to bash the city's hospitality industry into the ground in the last few years, but the fact remains that the lovely Song Hong (the new name for Mien Tay) in Battersea does rare beef pho for £13.50, four summer rolls for £8 (at Med Salleh they're 2 for £8.90) and all from a similar central London location. None of this should mean you should rule the place out of course, but it might mean you'll think twice about ordering that 2nd large main course dish.

Anyway all I can do is tell you how good the food is at Med Salleh - very good indeed - and leave it up to you whether you think it's worth the money and/or trip to Earl's Court. We had a lovely time in this friendly little basement restaurant and would happily go back and pay out of my own pocket, so that's as good as an endorsement as you're going to get really. If you're a local, then this is a very welcome addition to the area, and if you have a craving for authentic Vietnamese food cooked with skill and care, it's almost certainly worth a diversion. The way things are going, who knows, in a few years' time these prices might start looking like a bargain, so maybe you should get there while you can...

7/10

I was invited to Med Salleh Viet and didn't see a bill. Expect to pay about £70/head with a beer or two.

Mrs Le's Banh Mi and Grill, Battersea

In 2005 I moved to Battersea and, for a while, there was nowhere decent nearby to eat. Actually, that's not strictly true - the Greyhound on Battersea High St had a decent stab at being a sort of Antipodean gastropub for a while, though they'd perhaps misjudged the area's level of gentrification at the time as I distinctly remember being pelted with gravel by a gang of feral youths as I attempted to dine al fresco. Sadly the Greyhound and, less sadly, the youths, moved on.

A little later, the Fox and Hounds on Latchmere Road became our go-to local, and for a while was notable as the only pub in the area that refused to serve a burger and/or chips. Indeed, it still serves a mainly Italian selection of dishes (burrata, risotto, pasta) although sadly (again...) the standard of food dipped quite heavily when a certain chef quit around 2008 and is now really only worth visiting for the lovely beer garden out back. They now do a burger. With chips.

You can imagine my delight, then, when Mien Tay opened in 2009. on Lavender Hill. In stark contrast to the collection of half-assed pizza/kebab joints, fish & chip shops and bland curry houses that were their neighbours on this unlovely stretch of road, Mien Tay was a Proper Vietnamese Restaurant, serving fresh summer rolls, honey-glazed quail dipped in lime and salt and sizzling plates of spiced lamb and fried onions, in a cosy (if not always comfortable - blimey they love to keep those radiators on full blast) family-run space. It was - and crucially still is - a great little restaurant, and I go all the time.

Mien Tay could, I'm sure, have used their acquisition of one of the aforementioned half-assed fish & chip shops next door (it was called Salisbury's, if you care, which you shouldn't) as a kind of Mien Tay spillover, as the mothership quite understandably gets so slammed on weekday evenings. Instead, the concept is something genuinely new to London - a fiercely authentic (or so I'm led to believe) replica of the kind of grill restaurant you'd find in South West Vietnam, complete with laminated menus full of offal, seafood and grilled meats, and enough unusual eye-catching specialities to make any blogger's head spin.

As a blogger, then, and therefore someone with a compulsive habit of ordering the most unusual items on any given menu whether I think I'll like it or not, we started with chicken gizzards. These were, as chicken gizzards always are, quite alarmingly crunchy and without a great deal of flavour, although the fruit/lime dip they came with was lovely and it was all clearly very well done, at least as much as gizzards can be. I'm not going to complain about ordering chicken gizzards and then being given chicken gizzards, because that would be deeply unfair. If you love chicken gizzards, these are the chicken gizzards for you.

But what came next was much more to our tastes. Bivalves and cheese is a pairing that has a certain precedent in Western cooking - oysters "Rockefeller"[see edit] is a steakhouse starter staple - but here, treated to a cleverly balanced sauce and grilled just to the point where they're hot but the oysters themselves are plump and full of briney flavour, the match makes even more perfect sense. Apparently these delicacies are sold roadside in the region of Vietnam called (what else) Mien Tay, and their successful reproduction in London relies on only the largest oysters being available from Billingsgate. It's dishes like this, something (as far as I know) genuinely new on our shores that must have taken a certain amount of bravery to add to a menu in SW11 in 2018, that make you thank the stars that at least not everyone is running shy from innovation. A gamble for them, and us, that paid off wonderfully.

Lamb chops were somewhat more straightforward but hardly less enjoyable. Pink inside and touched with a charcoal char, they were listed with the suggestion "try with our sticky rice cakes" and so having ordered said rice cakes separately we were surprised to find the chops came with them anyway. So we ended up with quite a few rice cakes. Still, they were nice rice cakes so no harm done.

House pickles were excellent, particularly lemongrass which had a heavenly aromatic flavour perfectly offset by a sweet brine, and some sticks of turnip which had a pungent, complex character all of their own. Even more than places that make their own bread, I increasingly find that restaurants that do their own house pickling, brining and fermenting have their efforts rewarded tenfold. This was top pickle work.

Of course, we couldn't ignore the banh mi section of the menu and so ordered the "traditional" as a good test of their sandwich abilities. Filled with cracklingly fresh herbs, with more of those super house pickles and containing a generous amount of salty, smoky pork, this was about as good an example of this kind of thing as I've had in many a year. Even the bread was just right, fragile enough to allow complete satisfying bites containing all the filling, without sacrificing any structural integrity. I may have mentioned how close this places is to my house, but crucially it's also directly on my commute home from work. I see lots of banh mi in my future.

The bill for two people, with four beers and an extra banh mi to go (well why not) came to £56, perhaps not as bargain-basement cheap as Mien Tay was in its early years but still fantastic value for careful, fun, innovative cooking of this level. Yes, thirteen years after I moved to Battersea of course I wish there were more, and better places to eat in the area, but when somewhere like this comes along that allows me, even for a while, to ignore the other dross on Lavender Hill and pretend I live a few steps away from the foodie hub of Kingsland Road, well, they have my eternal gratitude. Any curious Londoner should find something to challenge and excite them in Mrs Le's Banh Mi and Grill; for local Battersea residents though, this is something very special indeed.

8/10

EDIT: Apparently Oysters Rockefeller doesn't involve cheese. I don't know why I thought it did. Sorry.

Salvation in Noodles, Dalston

Opening a Vietnamese noodle shop in Dalston has, it must be said, a touch of the coals-to-Newcastle about it. The main thoroughfare in this part of town is Kingsland Road, home to a huge number of Vietnamese restaurants, many of them extremely good (the Viet Grill is, and always has been my own favourite) and most of them able to knock up a comforting bowl of Pho faster than you can say Ăn ngon nhé.

But I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until (and until well after) you're all entirely sick of hearing it, there is no reason to complain about somewhere being a bit derivative, or flaunting a familiar concept, if the end product is decent and value for money. Not everywhere can be, or needs to be, stunningly original, and anyone boycotting, say, Clockjack Oven because it's a bit like Chicken Shop, or avoiding Dirty Burger because you've already been to Patty & Bun, risks diddling themselves out of some very nice food indeed.

Anyway, speaking of Dirty Burger and Chicken Shop, I'm reliably informed the very same brains (Nick Jones' Soho House) are behind Salvation In Noodles on Ball Pond Road, and you can see some of the family resemblance in the garden shed interior and clean, pared-back menu. The Soho House group certainly has its fans, and its detractors, and while there are clearly better places in town to get chicken and burgers both, I've never left any of their branches disappointed.

SIN seems to be aiming for a similar level of comfortable competence. Chicken wing starters had a very (perhaps a bit TOO) crisp skin but contained piping hot, moist flesh and had a good amount of those fragrant Vietnamese flavours (garlic, fish sauce).

Fried spring rolls were slightly less successful - a thick, rough pastry had swallowed up a lot of the cooking fat, meaning they were rather soggy - but the flavours again were good (nice and porky) and I liked the sweet & sour dipping sauce they came with.

Noodle soup is really what you come here for though, and Bun Rieu was worth every bit of the £9.50. In a vast bowl of complex, beguiling stock floated brown crab meat, slices of incredibly tender pork and some huge, bouncy-fresh prawns. Fresh herbs and vegetables added texture and SE-Asian aromas, and whilst I have had slightly better noodles once or twice, for the price and considering the generosity with the seafood, you really couldn't complain.

The beef version (Pho bo) was just as successful. Thin ribbons of pink steak slowly poached to grey as you work your way through more lovely stock, springy beef balls, and another generous pile of noodles, herbs and vegetables. Again, it's not the greatest Pho in London but it is certainly nowhere near being the worst, and £9 gets you way more than you could reasonably expect. Even the Viet Grill's beef pho is £1 more a bowl, for example.

Good food served at reasonable prices seems such an obvious thing for a restaurant to aim for that to praise anywhere for doing exactly that seems rather like congratulating the buses for running on time. But as we've all occasionally discovered to our cost in this city, and this rather credulous part of town in particular, not everwhere has their priorities in the right order. So for a bill of £45 for two people, for plenty of food and three beers, thank you Salvation in Noodles for being good enough to make me want to return. "Salvation", though, does seem a bit dramatic; may I suggest... "Satisfaction"?

7/10



EDIT: Salvation In Noodles have been in touch to say that actually they are nothing to do with Soho House, the confusing seemingly arising from the fact that owner Colin Tu used to run Big Dirty Burger, no relation to Soho House's Dirty Burger. So huge apologies to Colin, and best of luck with Salvation In Noodles which surely deserves to do well.

Kêu!, Old Street

Considering the abuse I occasionally get for slating (or otherwise) restaurants based on one visit ("you should be fair-minded enough to visit more than once" - er, no thanks) then reviewing somewhere based on a single dish may seem deliberately provocative. But in the case of Kêu!, a brand-spanking-new Vietnamese sandwich bar from the prodigious talents behind Cay Tre and Viet Grill restaurants, I hope I'm on safer ground because, firstly, being a sandwich shop one dish is all most customers will order anyway, and secondly, people don't generally tend to get as bothered about positive reviews. And thanks to a truly magnificent Banh Mi from Kêu!, this review is going to be very positive indeed.


With Josh from Cooking the Books having visited already this week to try the house special Keu Sandwich (spiced belly of pork with ham terrine and chicken liver pate), and being suitably impressed with it, I thought I should attempt to explore another corner of the menu; perhaps BBQ Mackerel, to see if they are as comfortable with seafood as meat, or even the 'Lap Xuong' sausage just to see what the hell it even was. However, I'm only human - one look at the rows of glistening pork ribs hung up behind the counter at Kêu! and I found myself ordering a BBQ Pork banh mi, along with a £2 cup of blood orange juice.


I was a little concerned at first to see the baguettes were more of the French crusty style than the lighter rice flour type used by the guys at Banh Mi 11, but as soon as I'd taken the first bite it hardly seemed to matter. It was, quite simply, glorious. All the ingredients that make a banh mi so special were there - fresh herbs, the occasional bite of red chilli, the crunch of daikon radish and cucumber and sweet lemongrass, but lifting it into something legendary was a layer of the most unbelievably tender roast pork, perhaps the best example of its kind I've yet had in London, perhaps anywhere. Whether it was merely because I was early enough to catch it straight out of the oven or Kêu! do in fact make roast pig better than anybody else is something only time will tell, but for now I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I ate the sandwich, with its complex balance of fresh herbs and silky pork fat and chilli, in awestruck silence.


I have since learned that the bread used by Kêu! for their banh mi is the result of months of research in collaboration with Clarke's bakery, and the reason they haven't gone down the rice flour route is that to create the "authentic" ethereally light-but-still-crunchy trademark banh mi baguette involves the use of artificial improvers, something they were unwilling (probably quite rightly) to do. So yes, the crunchy sourdough is a little hard on the jaw muscles and isn't strictly "authentic" but on the other hand it adds flavour, a lovely golden colour and is a top quality craft product in its own right, so shut up and enjoy it.


As if I needed yet another reason to wax lyrical about Kêu!, there's the little matter of the price. This is by some distance the best sandwich I've enjoyed in a long while, nearly a foot long, stuffed with premium expertly cooked ingredients and encased in artisan bread, and to be charged £4.50 for it just seems like some kind of confidence trick or early April Fools joke. Think how much you'd be charged for a 12" "Meatball Marinara" from depressingly virulent Subway, horrible things in soggy plastic "bread" which seem to taste completely identical no matter which of the myriad of processed fillings you choose. Kêu! couldn't be more different - it's cheap, delicious and made by clever, talented people who care, and I intend to spend the next few weeks working my way through the rest of the menu.

9/10

Café East, Surrey Quays

There are unlikely locations, and there are unlikely locations. And then, in the corner of a car park next to an ugly great cinema and shopping mall in a desolate area of Surrey Quays, there is Café East. To say it's in the middle of nowhere is being kind - I imagine it's a special journey for people living in Surrey Quays - and were you to pass it by on the way to Hollywood Bowl or park your car up next to it for a trip to the Odeon I doubt you'd give it a second glance. Its competition is a Burger King, a Frankie and Benny's and something called a West Coast Bar & Grill, which I hadn't heard of previously but whose menu reads like one of my worst nightmares, and although I was here on a number of pretty solid recommendations, well, you can't blame me for being suspicious.




But here we were anyway, surveying the large - in physical size if not number of dishes - menu with its handy photos and well-written descriptions. I don't know why I should find photos of the food a pleasant help on Asian menus but a sign of weakness on Western ones, but for some reason I do. Perhaps it's just that Asian food photographs better? Either way, the pictures were good enough to prompt us to order two starters and two mains, and a weird sweet dessert drink called Sam Bo Luong, which had coconut milk and beans and jellied sweets and all sorts in. It tasted a bit like something an overenthusiastic toddler might make for his or her parents as a birthday "treat" out of whatever they could find in the fridge, but was pleasant enough.



Vietnamese spring rolls (Cha Gio) were crunchy and soft in all the right places, and came with a delightfully diverse array of accompanying veg, including sweet basil, bean sprouts, mint, chopped red chillis, coriander and iceberg lettuce. I wasn't sure quite how to combine the salad and the veg to the desired effect, but wrapping one up in iceberg with a bit of coriander and dipping it in the vinegary chilli dip seemed to work pretty well.


Banh Cuon was even more fun. Cheung-fun style steamed rice pastries contained mushroom and minced pork, and were arranged into a neat pile topped with crispy, caramel-y fried shallots and salty slices of luncheon meat. In my tragic foodie way I was perhaps more impressed that I'd never seen this on any other menu before than the actual taste of the dish itself, but it was nonetheless very good, with addictive texture contrasts and a fantastic meaty filling inside the silky pastry. A bargain, too, this amount of food for less than £5.



Mains were even more impressive, in size and flavour. An enormous deep bowl of Bun Bo Xao contained gorgeously rich, sweet stir-fried beef, vermicelli, bean sprouts, sweet pickled carrots and God knows what else along with a spicy fish sauce. After I had thoughtfully picked at each of the component parts for a few minutes my companion lost patience and mixed it all up together with her chopsticks, as I'm sure is the intended style. It was still good, with that mix of textures that the Vietnamese get so right, and particularly bouncy noodles.


And what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't try the house Pho, which with its deeply beefy broth and mix of cooked and raw beef slices ticked every box in my admittedly-not-too-exhaustively-researched What Makes A Good Pho checklist. Like the Bun Bo Xao it was generous in size as well as flavour and surely the best way to spend £7 in a restaurant this side of Shadwell. Actually perhaps that's not much of a compliment. This side of Kingsland Road, then.

Stuffed to the gills, faces flushed with chilli and happiness, we paid our paltry £15 a head bill and waddled off home across the windswept car park towards Surrey Quays Overground. On the way out though, we had a quick peer into the impressively large kitchens, where vast gleaming stockpots bubbled away and a surprising number of chefs worked at the various things chefs do in kitchens. It made sense that food of that standard should come out of such a professional operation, but it is extraordinary just how many staff can make their living in a restaurant charging such tiny prices for such huge portions of excellent fresh food. But I'll leave fretting about operating profits to someone else. Café East was doing a roaring trade last night, and of course it's no miracle that it's popular, despite the herculean effort to get there. They serve brilliant Vietnamese food, smartly, pleasantly, and for not very much money. That, and there's no competition for miles around. Clearly somebody there knows what they're doing.

8/10

Banh Mi Bay, Bloomsbury

I had my very first bánh mì (a kind of Vietnamese/French street food snack) from a little stall on Broadway Market over a year ago, and really rather enjoyed it. First of all, I was surprised by the texture of the bread - I'm told genuine bánh mì use baguettes made of rice flour, which provide a much softer texture than the usual crusty French sticks. Secondly, the filling was also interesting, with all the familiar flavours of good Vietnamese food (coriander, spicy grilled pork paté, pickled carrots and I think perhaps a dash of fish sauce) in a handy lunchbox-sized portion. The textures were addictive, the flavours recognisably Vietnamese and the price pleasingly low - I was impressed, and given the relative ease of setting up a stall and availability of the key ingredients I expected to see banh mi stall popping up on every street corner. For whatever reason, that never seemed to happen - banh mi in London are still a rarity.


And so the opening of Banh Mi Bay on the corner of Gray's Inn Road and Theobald's Road, just a short trot from my office on High Holborn, was a very exciting prospect. If they were as good as the example I'd tried all that time ago in Hackney, and were a similar price, I could easily see myself becoming their best customer, gorging myself silly on soft rice flour baguettes and becoming forever the incumbent "mayor" on Foursquare. Sadly, the reality of the new place was far more mundane.


From the first bite, you could tell these were not "authentic" (a meaningless word really but it will have to do) rice flour baguettes, just normal crusty French sticks, meaning my jaw was aching so much before I was even 2/3 through I had to give up. That wasn't the only problem though. Instead of a freshly grilled slice of spiced pork, the protein for this particular banh mi was taken from a pile of pre-sliced processed meat that looked suspiciously like what goes into a Subway. Not very attractive. Sweet pickled carrots were fine, and I did get the odd hit of red chilli, but it was desperately missing some stronger flavours - perhaps some dressing or fish sauce, I can't tell you, but something to lift it out of the ordinary. I am acutely aware that given I've only ever had one of these things previously in my life I can hardly claim to be an authority on the matter, but out of the two, one was delicious and one wasn't.


At £2.80 for quite a large sandwich it was at least cheap, but to be good value it also needed to be worth £2.80, and I really don't think it was. But a side order of summer rolls came with a nice hoi sin sauce and seemed remarkably fresh considering they just lifted it off a shelf when I asked for it, so perhaps there are other items hidden on the quite lengthy menu that are worth exploring. I quite like the idea of the 'shredded caramel pork' banh mi, and of course for eat-in diners only they do a Pho, another good test of a Vietnamese kitchen. So perhaps I will be back, and perhaps I will eventually decide Banh Mi Bay is brilliant. But in the interests of fairness, I have to rate on my first visit, and based on yesterday's lunch, there are better ways to spend your money in Bloomsbury. Chilli Cool is just around the corner, for a start.

5/10

Viet Grill, Kingsland Road

Mien Tay Battersea is a wonderful restaurant, serving spectacular food at miniscule prices, with staff so smiley and warm you want to take them home with you. It would be a wonderful restaurant anywhere in London, of course, but as I've mentioned before, its location on Lavender Hill is nothing short of a miracle, and has probably single-handedly raised the nearby house prices to a statistically significant degree. But it's too easy to forget that back where it all began for Vietnamese food in London, on the Kingsland Road in the East End, there are a selection of restaurants who regularly give Mien Tay a run for its money, and fuel the virtuous circle of competition and higher standards that we've come to expect from this most exciting and satisfying of cuisines. One of these restaurants is the Viet Grill.



Unusually for reviews on this blog, this isn't my first visit to the Viet Grill. I usually try and write up places after a first visit, which is perhaps not a completely fair method (to say the least) but is at least consistent, and I estimate I've eaten here well over twenty times since I discovered it a couple of years ago. Other than a lick of paint and the occasional change of staff, though, not a great deal has changed, so I hope this is as reliable a review as any other I've posted. Not very, in other words. But here we go anyway.


If there's one thing that the Vietnamese can do better than anyone else, it's a salad. It's mainly a texture thing - the combination a multitude of ingredients that go pop, crunch, squish and splosh, all on one plate, is addictive and unique, as far as I can tell, to these kinds of restaurants. This mango salad contained fragrant Thai basil, tasty shoots of (I think) lotus stem, a couple of hits of bright red chilli and - best of all - crunchy tubes of salty dried squid tentacles, and it all worked together perfectly. All the fresh, fragrant ingredients not only made an incredibly tasty dish but even made you feel like you were doing yourself good when eating it. And you can't often say that.


Crispy spring rolls were perhaps quite a tame choice (we had eaten the delicious summer rolls on many previous visits and fancied a change) but were deftly fried and had a greaseless crunch. They came with a thin, vinegary chilli dip which was a cut above your average gloopy sweet sauce, as you'd expect.


This beautiful, tender, charcoal-seared 'Feudal roasted beef' was at £9 one of the more expensive starters, but boy do you get your money's worth. First of all, the sheer quantity of it, which would by most restaurants standards be a good main course portion, and also, the beef itself was superb, powerfully marinated and served with an umami-rich soy dressing.


I didn't know what to make of the Saigon pork belly dish when it first arrived - it looked challenging to say the least, the huge cubes of fat wobbling provocatively in the caramelised coconut sauce. But on tasting, all was forgiven. I admit to separating the majority of the fat from the meat and leaving it uneaten - there was too much of it even for me - but the coconut sauce was rich and moreish and the stewed pork pieces had fantastic strong flavour.


Along with a couple of bowls of steamed rice (which I used to soak up the rest of the pork coconut sauce) and a couple of glasses of wine, the final bill came to £20 each, perhaps slightly more than the same meal might have been at Mien Tay but in nicer surroundings and with certainly a comparable level of cooking. Kingsland Road is a fine example of what can happen when restaurants all compete on the same style of cuisine, and instead of trying to survive by slashing ingredient costs and employing pushier fronts of house (a la Brick Lane) instead try to outdo each other by serving better food. It's the way it should work and yet so rarely does. And the results speak for themselves.

9/10