London’s best Vietnamese restaurants

Friends of pho make a beeline for the excellent noodle soups on offer at this shining star of the Kingsland Road Vietnamese scene. Big, light and buzzy, Sông Quê is constantly packed with happy customers including many families and a good showing of Vietnamese locals, while the food is always first-class – and highly authentic too. Textures are perfect and the flavours are true.

Now happily embedded in Peckham, this former street-food outfit serves up classic Vietnamese dishes in a modest, neutrally decorated, plywood-clad setting. Classics such as summer rolls, pho and noodle salad share the billing with more unusual ideas including the house special – bánh khot pancakes filled with prawns and topped with spring onion. Space is tight, but there’s more room at the Brixton branch.

Long-established, family-run, simple and well-loved, Green Papaya is a real Vietnamese charmer with laidback yet welcoming staff and superb food – including a spot-on version of crispy, crunchy soft-shell crab with salt and chilli. The cooking also absorbs some Xi’an Chinese influences: our grilled spicy lamb with cumin, a rarity on most Vietnamese menus, was a revelation. 

Cây Tre offers just about everything you might expect from a Vietnamese restaurant in Soho: chic, minimalist decor; impeccably smart staff; beautifully served food. The group prides itself on using freshly sourced ingredients of impeccable provenance – witness the super-tasty Devon crab wrap with crisp lettuce and perilla leaves or barbecued Somerset ribs with lemongrass, sriracha chilli sauce and galangal. There’s also a branch in Hoxton.

Out of the same stable as Cây Tre and Kêu, Viet Grill is less ramshackle than most of its neighbours on Kingsland Road. It boasts a dedicated ‘pho bar’ and a trendy cocktail list, no less, while the food runs from fashionable ‘small eats’ (anchovy chicken wings, ‘pillow dumplings’ etc) to curries, claypot specialities, vermicelli bowls and meaty offerings from the Josper grill.

It’s a bonus to find proper Vietnamese cooking in Holborn, so load up on pho soups, summer rolls, bánh xeo (pancakes) and other classics at this handily placed joint. At lunchtime, local workers pop in for takeaway bánh mì (crisp baguettes stuffed with pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber and a filling of your choice), while the various versions of pho are perfectly decent renditions.

Enticing aromas waft from this charming little Vietnamese café, where the menu offers everything from lightly spiced noodle soups (bun hue or pho) to vermicelli salads and spring rolls. Expect lengthy queues at lunchtime – although the pace is fast.

The first permanent site from Viet-Aussie chef Damon Bui, CôBa is a classy-looking restaurant with a high-spec industrial finish and a liking for kick-ass Vietnamese barbecue cooking. The menu is short, with dishes inspired by the kind of food Bui’s mother served him back in Aus. Our top picks? Crystal-clear beef pho and a belting barbecue lemongrass-pork-and noodle-salad. Great cocktails too.

Throwing down the Vietnamese gauntlet right outside the entrance to Chinatown, this hip outfit puts an ultra-chic spin on things with its industrial interiors and throbbing dance music. The cooking’s pretty cool too, with a pick ’n’ mix menu of stellar street food devised by ex-Hakkasan chef Jeff Tan – do try the stir-fried french beans with sticky beef and the sweet coconut-crunchy deep-fried calamari.

Related to Cây Tre and Viet Grill, this Vietnamese sandwich shop/deli is famed for its bánh mì – in fact, the bread for these tip-top ‘baguettes’ is up there with the very best in London. As an intro, order the ‘classic’ version packed with slices of roast pork, cucumber sticks, coriander leaves, red chilli, pickled carrot and daikon. Simple, but good. Kêu’s original branch is in Shoreditch and there's also a spot on London Wall.

Not far from the Hackney Picturehouse, this smart-ish café/takeaway seems to get plenty of business from the local Vietnamese community – no doubt because of its wide-ranging and esoteric repertoire. Check out the Westlake prawn cakes, the sizzling goat with lemongrass and the ‘cha ca la vong’ – a real treat comprising grilled monkfish marinated in turmeric, galingale and dill, with vermicelli and peanuts.  

This swish Fitzrovia townhouse venue offers fairly priced Vietnamese food in a luxe colonial setting. Bowls of punchy fragrant pho, dumplings, curries and shaking beef share the limelight with seafood noodles and a splendid salad of deep-fried trout with vibrant, crunchy star fruit, mango and fresh herbs. Good for groups.

A destination for first-rate cooking. Seafood is the big draw here and the kitchen proves its mettle with brilliant ideas such as stir-fried green mussels with ginger and spring onion, or scallops with black bean sauce. There are also sibling spots in Fulham and Wood Green.

Ngon means ‘delicious’ in Vietnamese, and this place lives up to its name. A starter of lotus root salad is a good introduction to the cuisine, while the line-up runs from bánh mì, noodle soups and salads to various rice combos (try the house special with grilled pork cutlet, steamed crab and pork terrine, shredded pork, pickled daikon and nuoc mam). Drink Saigon beer or bubble tea.

At this unfailingly welcoming spot near Ravenscourt Park, pho is a treat, with a strong stock and all the power of traditional flavours and herbs. Top marks for the crisp vegetarian spring rolls, the flavoursome soft-shell crab and the slow-cooked pork with quail’s eggs in coconut juice too. Reliably good all round.

A trade-up from the Tay Do Café across the road, this family-run south Vietnamese restaurant specialises in serving delicious low-cost food in rather garish surroundings – don’t expect much in the way of atmosphere here. Instead, focus on the big portions of authentic nosh – cavernous bowls of hu tieu soup, a fiery dish of chicken with chilli, lemongrass and soothing coconut milk, and so on. BYOB.