Pho Express: A Fabulous Vietnamese Spot Strikes Back

Name Pho Express 
Address 149 Upper Street, Unit B, London N1 1RA 
Phone none 
Web site none
Main dish price range £4.5
Rating 4 Stars.  The best place we know to nurse a pho addiction.  
Recommended dishes: 

Someone's studying up on one of London's best banh mi places.

When we last checked in with Pho Express, this tiny, Islington outpost serving Vietnamese food and crispy banh mi was still finding its footing, experimenting with some new ingredients and tweaking the menu and sandwich seasonings with every visit.  Now, several months in, we feel the need to give our loyal and faithful readers an update.  Why?  This place has gone from being good to simply amazing.

One of the first things I feel the need to address is the actual pho itself, which last time, as you may all remember, Nick and I had yet to try. Now, it's worth noting that I have always not been the world's biggest pho fan. I'm never sure what to do when I get the varietals that have hoisin sauce and radishes in little containers on the side, and I've worried in the past that I've taken versions of the soup and either overly seasoned it or kept it so simple I was missing some of the key allure. So it's much to my relief that at Pho Express, the four types of pho on hand (£5-6 each) are made entirely by you for the staff-- and are unlike any I've had before with their amazingly delicate flavorings and quality ingredients. Here, the broth is a light, beef broth, loaded high with large pieces of meat (your choice of chicken, beef, prawn or chicken plus beef), tons of fresh cilantro, and bits of lime that give it a refreshing citrus finish.

Pho shizzle: The amazing beef pho (Pho Bo) at Pho Express. 

Adding to the giant bowl of goodness the staff will readily add fresh, green chilies-- a favorite of Nick's, but perhaps not recommended for the less tough among us. A thick glob of egg noodles sop up the broth inside. Not only have I come to appreciate this pho, I crave it-- and eat it-- on a multi-times a week basis. The staff tells me it's North Vietnamese, different from the kind you'd typically find restaurants. Whatever it is, it's delicious.

Pho fan, pho-ever. 

And the banh mi served these days is now an almost equally palette-pleasing treat. As I mentioned last time around, the best banh mi is a study in opposites-- the crispy, flaky toasted bun and the well-sauced filling and pate inside balancing it out with warm, gooey goodness. The team at Pho Express has always nailed the baguette, offering up the perfectly crisp type of bread product you'd expect to find at a French corner shop. After experimenting with different dry herbs and flakes, however, the team seems to have decided to stick with the more classic iterations of the dish that they do best. My favorite is the barbecue pork (£4), which has cucumbers and sweet, pickled kohlrabi and carrots on top, along with fresh green chilies, which must be asked for as an extra topping. The Special banh mi (£5) is also the perfect balance of tastes and textures with its thick pieces of barbecue pork, homemade pate, and dried pork floss. They even have a Thap Cam banh mi (the most expensive banh mi at £5.5), which is billed as an "all in one option"-- presumably with grilled chicken and pork as well as pate and floss. I've been so hung up on my current favorites, I haven't yet ventured to try it.

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Taking in the local Angel scene, and the yummy banh mi.

Pho Express is certainly rapidly turning into a neighborhood star here in Islington, and certainly my favorite go-to lunch place.  In addition to the sandwiches and pho, the little spot also serves up Vietnamese rice bowls, including a Belly Pork and Spare Ribs in Caramel Sauce (£6). It's still short on seating space though-- besides a couple seats right in the window, they have a very low table with two seats sort of crammed haphazardly in front of the ordering counter, as well as a few seats outside-- relevant if spring would ever grace us with her presence. For now, I'm happy to slurp my soup and wash it down with a pitch-perfect, super sweet Vietnamese Iced Coffee (£2.50).  A nice bit of perfection.   

Believe the hype.

Santoré: We Found Our Go-To Neapolitan Pizza Place...for Now

Name Santoré

Address 59-61 Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell, London EC1R 4QL

Diners outside at Santore.

Phone 020 7812 1488
Web site none
Main dish price range £6.20-£13.80
Rating 4 stars. A stunner of a restaurant with only occasional misses.  
Recommended dishes Margherita pizza 

One could be forgiven for wondering if Santoré, our new favorite pizza joint in East London, even meets this blog's definition of an ethnic restaurant: "a restaurant serving the food of a particular ethinc group, with an aim to primarily serving expatriates from that ethnic group."  Located in trendy Exmouth Market, this bustling cafe, which strives to make authentic Neapolitan pizza, attracts a motley crowd-- a few tables of Italians, but also lots of big groups of red-faced, drunken British people just enjoying the big glasses of wine and pizza available by the meter. When Nick and I first walked in, we felt it was sort of part-way, if not all the way, in the ethnic category.  The waiters greeted us with a volley of friendly"buongiornos" and the pizza oven lurking in the corner definitely looked as authentic as authentic could be, based on our past experiences in Naples.

The typical scene at Santore.

But once we bit into the pizza we were convinced we had to include this brightly lit, low-on-atmosphere locale on the food blog. Although Santoré offers a few things that don't feel too authentically Italian (Dutch Veal Escalopes with Breadcrumbs, anyone?) diners who stick to the Neapolitan pizzas, Santore's specialty, are in for a real treat. We recommend the standard margherita pizza that appears in the pizze section of the menu-- not the pizze special section-- and sells for £6.20.  Like at any good Neapolitan pizza restaurant, this single-plate, one-person pie came to us hot and fresh out of the oven. The basil pieces were massive; the sauce tasted so fresh it burst with flavor; and the pizzaiolo nailed the absolute hardest part of the enterprise-- the center. The middle of the pie achieved that perfect, delicate balance where it managed to be hot, gooey, and melt-in-your mouth delicious, without going so far that the pizza lost all integrity when you tried to lift up the first slice.

My half of our margherita was gone pretty quickly.

Before we go on with our thoughts about Santoré though, a bit of background on our pizza philosophy: We're generally what you'd call simple pizza people. There are few places-- Pauly Gee's in Brooklyn, being a big exception-- where we ever gobble up pizzas loaded with non-standard ingredients like rocket (a.k.a. arugula), lemon, and olives. At most of our most beloved Neapolitan pizza joints, we prefer to let the perfect, bare, basics (tomato, cheese, basil, and big hunks of sea salt in the crust) stand out without too much adornment. Our favorite Stateside pizza place, in fact, so dogmatically adheres to the simple-is-best philosophy that on most days it only offers five basic pizzas on its  menu-- and not one of them has meat.

So, the margherita is always a big test for us.  A secondary test that we expect most places with a good margherita to ace: The buffalo margherita, a version of the basic pie where regular mozzarella is replaced with much stronger, buffalo mozzarella instead, usually producing a more delicious result. Surprisingly though, this is not the case at Santoré.  When we ordered this pizza-- which costs £7.65 and appears in the pizze special section of the menu-- they gave us a pie that was still perfectly executed from a crust standpoint. The cheese though was chilled in the middle, and felt like it had just been pulled out of cold water by the chef-- a bizarre choice that our waiter seemed to indicate was purposeful on the restaurant's part. If so, Santoré, as good as you are, let me tell you: You aren't doing yourself any favors with that approach.

The mixed salad.

Besides the pizza, the other things on the menu were impressive without being a total wow. The mixed salad (£3.50) was a nice way to start dinner, being a pleasant mix of arugula and cherry tomatoes, dusted with crispy ham.  And the sauteed spinach (£2.40), which was buttery and piping hot, also made a lovely side. Santoré also gets some bonus points for having ample seating outside, which makes for a nice atmosphere you can watch the hustle and bustle of Exmouth Market. These cold winter days, they're heating up the outdoor tables with red heat lamps-- with surprisingly successful results. (The lamps produced the odd light in our pictures though.)

For now, we're loving our post-gym trips to Santoré-- so much so we've already been back three times. We're going to keep looking for that pitch-perfect buffalo margherita though. We have a few more far-flung places to try that we crowd sourced with some Italians we know, so we'll be reporting back with more reviews soon.

Pho Express: Strong, New Banh Mi Offering In Angel

Taking in the Angel's Sunday scene, as well as its banh mi.

Name Pho Express 
Address 149 Upper Street, Unit B, London N1 1RA 
Phone none 
Web site none
Main dish price range £4-5
Rating 3.5 Stars.  Definitely go if you're in the neighborhood.  
Recommended dishes:  Banh Mi with either BBQ pork or shredded chicken


Please note: This review has since been updated.  Check out our latest musings on Pho Express here. 


My husband, Nick,  is definitely one picky person when it comes to banh mi, the Vietnamese sandwiches on toasted French bread that sparked a NYC mini-craze a couple years ago.  A native of Oakland, Nick remembers eating the warm sandwiches when he was still in high school, popping out of work with a Vietnamese co-worker to go buy them on International Avenue. So, to say the least, when we first moved to this country we were both been pretty disappointed with the incarnations of our favorite Vietnamese treat on offer in London.  The Banh Mi Bay restaurant near Holborn, while definitely cutesy and British looking, wasn't spicy enough for our taste-- and like a lot of Brit sandwiches, went a bit too heavy on the spread (in this case, pâté). The places setting up shop in Broadway Market definitely nailed the iced, Vietnamese coffee, but the their bread didn't have the toasty, flaky texture that makes banh mi such a study in the joy of opposites-- ie: moist, wet veggies on hot, heavily-toasted, crunchy bread. 

The new owner  is always ready with recommendations at Pho Express.

So we were clearly only cautiously optimistic when we learned that a banh mi place down the street from our house was getting taken over by a pair of Vietnamese cooks with family ties to the Que Viet restaurant on Kingsland Road in Hoxton. The banh mi place, a tiny, take-away sandwich counter with three seats inside-- and only a few tables on the sidewalk out front-- quickly changed its name from Ca Phe to Pho Express. The owners also went on a major charm offensive, smilingly engaging with customers, lengthening their hours late into the night (new, late-night tipsy food, people!), and often describing to anyone who would listen how their goal was to bring authentic bahn mi and pho to the neighborhood. They even tacked a map of Vietnam up to the wall inside for good measure.


And the good news is they've definitely improved substantially on East London's banh mi options.  The shop's four banh mi sandwiches-- Classic, BBQ Pork, Garlic Beef, and Shredded Chicken (all £4)-- all now boast heftier portions of fresh, hot meat, served on nearly perfect, toasted French baguettes.  Instead of just relying on Sriracha sauce to give a spicy kick-- as good as that is-- fresh chilis are now also available, along with a whole host of fresh vegetables marinating behind the counter. Blissfully, they're also still serving Ca Phe's divine Vietnamese iced coffee (£2.50), which adds the ideal, sweet milky coating to your mouth to give you at least some feeling of immunity when you start piling on the chilis. 


For now, we're leaving the restaurant in the three-star range, simply because the menu still appears to be constantly evolving-- with occasionally mixed results.  On one recent visit, for instance, they dusted our sandwich with fried pieces of onion, which was good, but somehow didn't entirely work to improve the overall flavor combination. We also haven't yet tried the two flavors of pho that the restaurant-- true to its name-- now sells for £5 (available in shrimp or beef flavors). The owner told us when asked that he gets up at 5 am every morning to go and cook up the fresh pho stock at the kitchen at Que Viet-- a perfect encapsulation of how hard he appears to be working to make this place a London-wide standout. As the weather gets colder, you can bet we'll be back to give a try.  Stay tuned, eaters!

La Sacre Coeur, Islington

Name: La Sacre Coeur

Address: 18 Theberton St., London, N1 0QX
Phone: 020 7354 2618
Website: http://lesacrecoeur.net/index.html
Main dish price range: £9-12
Rating: 1/2 Star. If you are starving and everywhere else is booked, I guess you could go here.

I think this blog is maybe supposed to be about restaurants we recommend and I'm not sure French qualifies as "ethnic," but my experience here this Saturday night was kind of funny, so I'm going to break the rules.

This restaurant is off Upper Street just past Islington Green, where Essex Road splits off. It's on a quieter corner, away from the madness and chain restaurants on Upper Street, and probably has nice outdoor tables in the summer.

I met my friends A. and C., plus their guests, for dinner at 9pm. We were a larger party at 7, and it took a while to be seated. Meanwhile, we wondered at the chairs hanging from the ceiling and walls, and the generally tacky decor. I wasn't put off by this -- my favorite French restaurant in Brooklyn, Provence en Boite on Smith Street, has really ugly decor. For months I refused to go in, primarily because of the lace curtains, but also the yellow walls, the floral cushions, and the tacky posters. Instead I would go to Robin de Bois with its funky taxidermy and outdoor garden, or the neighborhood French favorite Bar Tabac with its wooden tables, art deco posters, and foosball table. But then my mother went to Provence en Boite one morning when she was visitng but before I was awake (so, before 10), and raved about it. And when I finally went I had to concede that the food was far superior to the other French places in the neighborhood. Ever since, I have theorized that perhaps ugly decor correlates to real French cooking, at least at a neighborhood bistro.

The people at La Sacre Coeur did seem to be authentically French. They also had, even for London, an extremely strange service style: A.'s boyfriend asked about which dishes the server would recommend, and the server described one dish as "fucking great." I don't think I've ever had a server use a swear word to me before, but it's an interesting technique. The female servers, on the other hand, weren't so bold, seeming to hang back just out of our lines of sight very awkwardly, so that the last person who'd ordered was obligated to alert the person next to them that it was their turn so that we could get on with it.

I'm not sure if what A.'s boyfriend ordered was fucking great. My beef stew, which was inextricably not Bourguignon (why?) was good, but the "mashed potatoes" were definitely from a mix, an anomaly in a country so fond of mash. The creme brulee was crispy on the top but freezing even right underneath. The portions were almost American sized, so I couldn't even make my grandmother's favorite restaurant comment: Such terrible food, and in such small portions.

The food wasn't awful and the company was great, so it wasn't a complete loss, but unless nothing else was available, I think I'll look elsewhere for my next French meal.