Kingsland Road in Shoreditch has a plethora of vietnamese restaurants along its long stretch. Viet Grill is one of the ones I’ve actually avoided because it looked too … well, polished. You can’t always judge a book by its cover, however, so it only seemed fair to give it a chance. Sandra and I arrived fairly early after work so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. You would have thought this meant a decent level of service. I think perhaps we caught them a bit unprepared as the service we got was a bit patchy. When we ordered our mains the starters arrived in reasonable time but then with our mains they either forgot my dish (we had both gone for a one bowl meal thing) or the kitchen’s timing was seriously back-firing. I couldn’t imagine the timing could be so off that all the tables around us (by then the place had filled up pretty quickly) were getting their food but we were still missing parts of our order! Getting the attention of wait-staff proved to be quite difficult too …

… but moving on from the service to the food. Was the food good enough to outweigh the not so fantastic service? Hmmm …

Piggy grilled aubergine – topped with minced pork & poached spring onions. This didn’t look like the best thing ever served and is expensive at £6.50 for the portion that we got but it was probably the best tasting item we had tonight. The Fresh summer rolls were fairly average though nothing to complain about. For our mains we decided we’d both go for an all in one bowl – when mine eventually came (charcoaled pork loin marinated in lemongrass & crispy imperial spring rolls with bun) I did enjoy it. The pork loin could have had more of a smoky charcoally flavour but otherwise it made for a satisfying meal. Sandra’s complaint about her dish was that it was much too spicy – a warning that wasn’t very obviously stated on the menu.

If Viet Grill could just do something about the service I think I would like it a whole lot better. Having said that prices are not unreasonable and if you’re prepared to potentially wait a long time for your food – its not half bad.