If you’ve ever slurped a bowl of pho loaded with fresh herbs or dunked spring rolls into a sweet peanut sauce, chances are you’ve tasted Southern Vietnamese cuisine. Food from the South is often bright, punchy and accompanied by generous toppings. Northern Vietnamese food, however, has more distinct French influences as well as cleaner, balanced flavours. It’s also a rarer find, with about only one in 10 Vietnamese joints in Singapore specialising in it.
Located in the basement of Marina One East Tower, Yenney has been serving the office crowd since 2022. The restaurant is already a lunchtime favourite for affordable pho and hearty rice bowls. But this month, it’s upping the ante with a new omakase-style experience, available on weekday dinners and throughout Saturday. For $39.90 per person (a launch promotion deal, with the usual price being $59), you get a 10-course walkthrough of Hanoi’s signature dishes, with up to two coffees and teas per person.
The food:
The meal starts with a trio of appetisers: fried spring rolls, fresh spring rolls and papaya salad. Nguyen, the restaurant’s owner, uses a proprietary recipe for her rice paper sheets, which are made in Hanoi and flown over. They have an exceptionally bouncy, chewy texture, and the dish comes with a homemade fish sauce for pairing – no peanut sauce here, a deliberate nod to the Hanoi way of enjoying spring rolls. Though if you want more kick, Yenney’s homemade chilli on the side (inspired by hae bee hiam sambal) does the trick.
The beef pho is clean-tasting with a subtle sweetness, simmered for seven hours and served with tender slices of A5 wagyu. There are no Hoisin or Sriracha bottles on the table, nor mountains of basil or mint. Instead, you’re encouraged to sip the broth as is – perhaps with a squeeze of lime and chilli padi at most. And when you’re done, feel free to ask for a refill.
Unusually, the meal pauses midway for coffee. You can choose between the classic cà phê trứng (egg coffee) or salt coffee with coconut milk, or both. We like that the egg coffee comes with none of that off-putting ‘eggy’ taste. Rather, farm-fresh eggs are whipped to a silky consistency, so that every mouthful is smooth, creamy, with just a faint hit of espresso.
Then comes the bún chả Obama, named after the dish Barack Obama famously shared with Anthony Bourdain in Hanoi. The dish looks like the spitting image of what you’d see in casual Northern Vietnamese eateries – a bowl of smoky, chargrilled pork belly and shoulder swimming in a fish sauce vinaigrette and pickled carrots, with sticky clumps of rice noodles on the side meant for dipping in the sauce.
New Zealand steak cubes follow – a nod to Hanoi’s French colonial past. But while they have a nice flavour from the red wine reduction and pepper jus, the presentation needs refinement. We much prefer the pork banh mi, encased in a buttery, shatteringly crisp baguette. It’s also here where we start feeling properly full, so make sure to pace yourself for this meal.
Desserts come in a duo: a lush avocado smoothie with toasted coconut flakes, and chè Hà Nội, a soupy mix of tropical fruits in coconut milk. The avo smoothie deserves a shoutout – a whole avocado is used for each serving, making it flavour-packed and protein-rich, while the toasted coconut flakes were decided upon after weeks of research and tasting. If you want to extend the experience, Yenney also offers a unique Sarawak juicy pale ale, though this isn’t part of the original menu.
The verdict:
At $39.90 per person, at least for the launch promotion, Yenney’s ten-course Vietnamese spread is decent value, with quality ingredients like A5 wagyu, kurobuta pork, New Zealand ribeye and fresh prawns thrown into the mix. And at this price point, the inclusion of four drinks (two teas and coffees) feels especially generous too.
But what really makes an impression is Nguyen’s commitment to delivering the pure taste of Hanoi and Northern Vietnamese cuisine, never mind potential comments that it lacks the vibrancy of Ho Chi Minh’s street food. While several dishes might still need tightening, the experience feels heartfelt and homey on the whole.
Would we come back? Yes, while it’s still under $40 at least. Come hungry, bring a curious friend, and be prepared to rethink what you know about Vietnamese food.
Yenney is open from Mondays to Saturdays at 5 Straits View, Marina One East Tower, #B2-50, Singapore 018935.
READ MORE:
It's confirmed: Singapore's first Chick-fil-A opens this December at Bugis+
Intercontinental Singapore to close by end-2025, will reopen as The Luxury Collection