Phở Thuý Tây Café
Vietnamese restaurant · Rotherhithe ·
Hanoi-style pho, rare beef salads, and offal platters
Hanoi-style pho, rare beef salads, and offal platters
"Relocated from Old Kent Road to Rotherhithe, the Hanoi pho at Phở Thuý Tây remains some of the absolute best in the city, and is a staple of the takeaway menu. Or, come in to collect, and order from a blackboard that might feature rare beef salads or grilled offal sausage." - James Hansen
"On Old Kent Road, Vietnamese students fill the restaurant’s five tables in anticipation of Hanoi deep cuts: frog-leg hot pots; deep-fried duck tongues; herbal, rare beef salads; or blood sausage — boiled or fried — formed from pale-marble boudins that float on the surface of the cooking pot like a herd of fat harbour seals bobbing in the sea." - Jennifer Trak
"Thuy Nguyen’s cafe on Old Kent Road does serve oustanding Hanoi pho of clarity and depth; it does serve crackling rare beef salads and fried duck tongues. But its crowning glory — only available from the Vietnamese-only blackboard as a special — is its offal platter, boiled or fried, with blood sausage and intestines aplenty ready to be dipped into mam tom, the concrete-grey shrimp paste whose colour belies its intensity." - Jonathan Hatchman
"Thuy Nguyen’s blood sausage is exceptional and it has an exclusivity that it deserves — only available from a Thursday and Friday litany of specials that Eater contributor Jonathan Nunn aptly describes as “Hanoi deep cuts.” Served boiled or fried, its husky, iron-sweet quality floods the palate, and is best when compounded by Nguyen’s mam tom." - Helen Graves
"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