Tay Do: Shoreditch, London

Tay Do

Date of Visit: 2^nd October 2013

Ambience

1 word – GREEN! Sound familiar? Yes, this place is almost as green as Song Que (almost because the staff wore white shirts as opposed to bright green ones).  My friend reckons the restaurants painted green are the more popular ones judging by how busy they get.

Again, this restaurant is small with tables cramped in tightly.. a running theme across all of the Viet restaurants?

Food

Between two of us, we shared a few starters and a main which were recommended by our server.  This consisted of Vietnamese spring rolls, a beef salad, prawn & pork cakes with rice paper and a hot & spicy crab vermicelli in soup. 

The portions of the starters were surprisingly on the large side and they were delicious.  I’m not normally a big fan of fried things as I hate the taste of food drenched in oil but the Vietnamese spring rolls were really good.  The filling was full and flavoursome and the outer skin was slightly sticky/gooey but not oily in the slightest – perfect when dipped in the fish sauce.   The beef salad was very very tasty as the thin slices of beef were served slightly rare which was well marinated.  The marinade gave the meat a nice kick as it was sour yet spicy and the salad was very refreshing.  As for the other starter, we had to roll the rice paper ourselves which was messy but great as you could fill it with whatever you wanted.  We started by filling the roll with mint leaves, prawn/pork cakes, vermicelli, lettuce and fish sauce but we later learnt that it was even tastier filling the roll with the marinated beef from the salad dish.  Yummy =) oh and the mats provided to separate the rice paper and for rolling purposes were great!

I wasn’t overly keen on the main dish as the soup base was overpowered by tomatoes and it was not hot or spicy in the slightest as the name suggested – to me it tasted like bolognaise.  Credit should be given for the amount of crab meat in the dish but it wasn’t to my liking.  However, my friend thought it was nice.

Service

Whilst we were discussing menu options, I felt the presence of one of the servers hovering around our table with their eyes on us but I had to tell him to give us a few more minutes since I felt a little rushed.  He came back about a minute later asking if we had any questions – of course we did.. they didn’t seem to have a couple of things we were after so we asked for recommendations and he seemed openly honest about what he would recommend and what was just ‘ok’. 

Most of his recommendations proved to be good ones but I have one complaint.. we requested for two things – for our fresh orange juices to not have ice in it and for the food to not have coriander but both were present even though he had repeated after us so he clearly understood the request.  This clearly did not get communicated to the kitchen staff though.  The coriander issue wasn’t a huge problem since most of it was garnish which could be removed easily but the drinks were a let down as we were only left with ¾ of a glass after we took out the ice cubes ourselves.

Summary

Overall, I enjoyed the food much better than Song Que and they had loads of other yummy sounding dishes on the menu including the pork cheung fun thing but we didn’t get to try that so I’m likely to return to this place but not after I’ve tried a few other Viet restaurants along the Pho Mile. Yes I’m on a mission =)