Dzo! Viet Kitchen, London: ‘Worth your money and your time’ – restaurant review
Dzo! Viet Kitchen, 163 Upper Street, London N1 1US. Small plates £7.90-£11.90, large and sharing plates £10.90-£25.90, dessert £7.50, Saigon beer £6, wine from £35
You’ll never want for an emergency schnitzel on Islington’s Upper Street. Or a plate of Padrón peppers. Or a charred broccoli salad, heady with the scent of health consciousness. You’ll never want for anything. Some years ago, I walked the road from Angel tube at the southern end to Highbury & Islington tube at the northern, counting places to eat. It was a bit like the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, only for people who have earned their prescription for statins. Back then there were well over 100 restaurants, and many more if you counted those tucked away down sidestreets. It’s a curious place, both profoundly neighbourhood and very much not. Most businesses were sparrows and starlings; a few were garish kingfishers.
Once, it was home to the hard-edged Granita, where in 1994 Blair and Brown may or may not have made their deal on the Labour party leadership, over the likes of an onion and sorrel tart and chargrilled chicken with spinach and pine nuts. Granita is long gone, but the original Ottolenghi is still here, as is that marvellous old stager, the Turkish restaurant Gallipoli, where they do a mean kofte. Cheery budget sushi places rub shoulders with Thai restaurants and cafés where they do unnecessary things to kale. Restaurant clusters like this can both be good for business and less so. People who want to eat out are drawn to huddles of possibility. But there’s also rabid competition, which risks sparkling gems becoming just an overlooked part of the edible landscape.
Dzo! Viet Kitchen, which opened just over a year ago, is one of those gems. The exclamation mark is there because “dzo” means cheers. They want to see a Saigon beer in your hand and your elbows on the table, though not necessarily at the same time. It’s a brightly lit, cream-coloured box of a room. The industrial edges and raw brickwork are only softened by the green of a few overachieving rubber plants and by dangling rattan lamp shades, shaped like the sort of straw hat Sophia Loren might have worn on the beach to keep the sun out of her eyes.
The menu is beautifully designed, which is to say, it features clean, graphic, block-colour illustrations that you linger over: of steaming bowls of pho, or overstuffed banh mi, or plump summer rolls, the open end of the soft rice paper exploding with foliage like a peacock’s tail feathers. We order the beef version of the latter and the real thing somehow manages to be even prettier than the illustration, the soft lettuce leaves bursting forth as if the roll simply can’t contain all the excitement. There is that comforting combination of softness and crunch from the vermicelli noodles and the bean sprouts, of grilled, marinated beef and a sweet-sour, mildly honking fish sauce to dredge them through. It feels like the sort of thing you should be eating at the start of the year when hopeful resolutions about being a better you have been made.
It’s tempting to linger over the familiar, to bury your face in a steaming bowl of soup noodles. But there is more here, which demands to be explored. A blackboard of specials includes something described as “pickled mustard green stir-fried pig fat’s end”. I need to know what the end of pig fat might be, for this feels like it could be my specialist subject. Our waiter tells me it’s not available. She will not entertain further enquiry. Another waiter, pushed for an answer, later announces it means “intestine”. I don’t get to unpack the language, but we all know I would have gone for that. Instead, we have another special of fried garlic crispy duck, which is a hands-on job of densely battered pieces, deep-fried until dark, which crunch and shatter with each bite. The duck lies beneath a salty mess of stir-fried garlic, chillies and spring onions. Ask for more napkins, then use them on the grilled quail, which arrives crusted with salt and chilli and begging to be gnawed from the bone.
Famously, Vietnam’s food traditions bear the fat thumb-prints of French colonial rule, not just in those banh mi baguettes, but in the consommé-like broths that are the basis for pho and in the coffee culture. Fat prawns come crusted here in crushed salted egg yolk and fried until it has formed a crisp overcoat that gives way to the squeak of the fresh shellfish beneath. It is then blanketed in a soft, rich mayonnaise-like sauce, of a sort that often turns up as the lubrication in banh mi.
Slices of soft, chewy goat, fried in heaps of garlic and lemon grass are very much not French-influenced. It’s a classic southeast Asian stir-fry. Or you could order the whole sea bass, lightly battered and deep fried, so the scored skin is crunchy and the flesh pulls away tidily from the bones, until you are picking the cheeks clean. It is positioned on the plate on its belly, the tail curving around as if it’s swimming away from you, and then drenched cheerfully in a thick, sweet chilli sauce. Get more napkins. For greens we have a heap of morning glory, fried in more garlic, spun through with bean sprouts and topped with crispy shallots, from a list that includes various vegan options. The next morning, I will be told by my loved ones that my breath is distinctly “savoury”. I wear this as a badge of honour.
There are only two desserts and one of them, the banana fritters, is finished. Instead, we have the lychee fruit cocktail with ribbons of bouncy jelly as green as Wicked’s Elphaba, shavings of fresh coconut and coconut milk. It rests on crushed ice as if it’s a steamy night in Hanoi and the jelly might melt, rather than an extremely chilly night in Islington, and is a little underwhelming. A reminder: you are on Upper Street. Among the 9,473 restaurants and cafés within walking distance, there are many prepared to sell you cake. Dessert can be found elsewhere. Then again, in the basement here is a karaoke room and if it hadn’t been a school night, I might well have ordered a Cà Phê martini – vodka, Tia Maria, Vietnamese coffee; all the good things – and demanded someone sing Islands in the Stream with me. Crowded restaurant alleys like Upper Street can make it tough to choose where to spend both your money and your time. Dzo! Viet is most certainly worth a bit of both.
News bites
For the second week in a row there’s good cause to mention chef Gary Usher in this column. He has taken to social media to encourage people to support a crowdfunder for Ashley Lawlor, a sometime employee of his Elite Bistros group, who just before Christmas had to have an arm amputated to stop the spread of a cancerous tumour. Her friends are now raising funds to buy her as advanced a prosthetic as possible, or for adjustments to her living circumstances that will make life easier. Read more and donate here.
After just eight months, the team behind the well-received Café Britaly in London’s Peckham have called it a day. The restaurant was established to celebrate the British love affair with Italian food by making ‘Italian dishes more British, and British dishes more Italian’. Founders Richard Crampton-Platt and Alex Purdie have said that they were stymied by ‘challenging trading conditions, which were compounded by the autumn budget’. They say, however, that the brand may return in some form.
And congratulations to Lorna McNee of Cail Bruich in Glasgow who is joining BBC2’s Great British Menu as a judge. McNee won the competition back in 2018 and is replacing Nisha Katona of the Mowgli restaurant group, who departs after three years. ‘Winning Great British Menu made a huge difference to my career as a chef and was partly behind me becoming chef director at Cail Bruich,’ McNee says. ‘So I know just how much the competition means to Britain’s chefs. I’m loving the chance to help choose this year’s banquet finalists.’ Chef Tom Kerridge and comedian Ed Gamble remain on the panel.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Instagram @jayrayner1
