The Best-Value Restaurants in London

"In a city where the regionality of Vietnamese cuisine is usually flattened into a bland litany of pho and bun, Thuy Nguyen’s cafe on Old Kent Road is completely sui generis ─ a proudly Hanoi restaurant where the pho is limpid and crystalline and the broth so life-affirming anyone could drink it everyday. But it’s the Thursday and Friday specials that launch it into another league: crispy salt and pepper duck tongues, herbal, rare beef salads; or blood sausage, boiled or fried and formed from pale-marble boudins, dipped in the corrupt flavour of mam tom ─ a bureaucratic grey shrimp paste with the funk of a thousand prawn heads reduced to the density of a neutron star." - Jonathan Nunn