Vietnamese Food & Snog To End Our Saturday

After our failed day of sightseeing, we took the Tube to Old Street, in the borough of Islington, to find a Vietnamese restaurant called Cay Tre, which Paul had read great reviews about on several food critiquing websites.  Although the spring rolls were among the best I’ve ever had, the rest of our dinner wasn’t as spectacular as we had read.  Calvin and I both ordered a dish called Bún bò Huế, which is vermicelli with slices of beef in a spicy broth, and it didn’t taste anything like the Bún bò Huế we’ve had at Vietnamese restaurants in Canada – the broth wasn’t spicy enough and didn’t have any lemongrass flavour, which it should, and the meat wasn’t the same kind at all.  Looking around us, we didn’t see any Vietnamese people eating there, leading us to conclude that this is a somewhat “westernized” style of Vietnamese food and those reviews we had read were written by people that are used to this type and not the truly authentic stuff…

Since it was still early, we decided to take the Tube back to Piccadilly Circus to check it out at night, and then went walking around Chinatown trying to find somewhere to have bubble tea, which Paul and I haven’t had since we left Vancouver (and we used to have it once a week!).  We searched all of Chinatown but couldn’t find a bubble tea place that was open, and it was only 10 p.m.!  As we were complaining to each other about how crazy it is that London’s Chinatown doesn’t have a freaking bubble tea place that’s open till midnight, a young Caucasian guy who happened to be walking by heard us, and told us that there’s one place that should still be open, but only for another 15 minutes or so for takeout.  We asked if he knew of anywhere to sit down, and he suggested a Chinese restaurant that also does bubble tea, or a new frozen yogurt place called Snog, where he and his girlfriend had just gotten a yogurt to go.

Taking his advice, we wandered around Chinatown trying to find the restaurant he was talking about, but we had no luck finding it so we decided to look for Snog instead.  After half an hour of searching and asking random people if they knew where Snog was (Google maps on Paul’s blackberry was no help because it’s a new place), we finally found it thanks to a rickshaw driver pointing us down the correct street!  The frozen yogurt was good, but sort of a rip off of the Pinkberry concept that took off in the US a few years ago.  Snog’s yogurt tasted better, but the toppings at Pinkberry are better in terms of variety and taste. 

We had to cut our night short and rush home when we found out from the girl working at Snog that the Tube shuts down at midnight – we were expecting it to run all night and we don’t know how to get home on the bus!  Thank God we decided to ask her if she knew when the Tube stops running as we were ordering our yogurt!  We quickly finished our yogurt and made it just in time to catch the last train to our hotel at 11:45 p.m. I can’t believe a public transportation system as major as the Tube shuts down so early!  Who designed this crap?!?!