Miss Chu (CLOSED)

This little hole in the wall stretches back through a long corridor furnished with seating to an open kitchen at the back. Classic Vietnamese street and café food is produced both for a busy takeaway and delivery business and for eat-in customers packed on to tiny tables below and array of artful hanging lamps. It’s stylishly decorated: the Laos-born owner has many years of experience running restaurants in Sydney, where she moved as a child refugee.

Specials are chalked on a blackboard; orders are taken at the kitchen counter. We rated our pho (beef noodle soup) as having a good stock – even the vegetarian version, loaded with shiitake mushrooms, gave great umami, and the noodles were pert but slippery. The bahn mi (filled baguette) was fine; there’s a lot of competition in London, and we’ve had many better. The giant-sized summer rolls were disappointing, being mostly filled with flavourless vermicelli; we had expected better from the self-proclaimed ‘queen of rice paper rolls’. But overall, a big thumbs-up for good food and fair pricing.