20/09/2026: Accomplished Vietnamese Cooking in a Restaurant Trying Too Hard
I judge a Vietnamese restaurant by its pho. So, having ordered it at Le Sourire de Saïgon, I was surprised to be asked whether I might prefer something else, since the pho, I was told, is small and generally taken as a starter. For a dish that is essentially hearty, generous street food, this was a curious reinvention. I replied, only half in jest, that pho is all I ever eat and I would content myself with whatever arrived. What arrived was clean, lean and delicate, subtle in the manner of the northern style and carrying an unusual note of aniseed, but without the depth and richness that make a great bowl. It was good, but not the benchmark I had hoped for.
The rest of the cooking was more convincing. The food was very good throughout, and there is genuine ambition in the kitchen. Glutinous sticky rice comes cooked in bamboo tubes, as it is in the mountainous north-west of Vietnam, which is an authentic and unusual touch. It is somewhat undone by the ceremony of peeling the tube open at the table, which tips from theatre into ostentation.
That tension between substance and display runs through the evening. The decor is attractive, but leans heavily Chinese for a restaurant that prides itself on being Vietnamese. Saigon's cuisine owes a good deal to its Chinese community, so some overlap is understandable. A pop-art portrait of Mao Zedong in the men's toilets is harder to explain. It suggests either that the look was never considered beyond a generic idea of the Far East, or that nobody expected the guests to notice the difference. The menu otherwise strives for style and distinction, yet it includes a page of photographs of customers at their tables, famous visitors I am told. It is an incongruous and rather vulgar note.
Service was detached and faintly disingenuous. Each plate was set down with a "bonne dégustation," sometimes murmured so quietly and with so little conviction as to be barely audible: a courtesy performed rather than meant. The table was laid with stemmed wine glasses, though none of us ordered wine, and when our beers and water arrived, no water glasses came with them. When we asked, we were told to use the wine glasses, and only my evident surprise prompted a swap for something more suitable. There is nothing wrong with drinking water from a wine glass. It simply sits awkwardly with the elaborate gastronomic experience the restaurant works so hard to project.
The idea of a gastronomic Vietnamese restaurant is a perfectly good one, and in the kitchen, at least, Le Sourire de Saïgon partly delivers it. But in reaching for style and distinction while slipping into vulgarity elsewhere, it comes across as pretentious and a little snobbish rather than refined. It is worth a visit for the cooking, provided you can overlook the performance around it.
14/09/2026: Ca kho to bon, chicken in coconut milk is okay, pho not recommended.
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