Give this Saigon a miss

This recent weather has seemed, well, not quite English. Appetites recoil at the idea of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and steamed jam roly-poly, and turn to the dishes of hot climates.

Vietnamese food, with its enthusiasm for the raw and the fresh, is particularly alluring. So it seemed fortunate to find in the post a press release for the newly opened Saigon Saigon in Hammersmith.

The restaurant's wide frontage with doors that fold back provided a sensation of eating outside without being too close to car fumes, however authentic those might be in Saigon.

The menu looked comprehensive and reasonable, with most of the main courses priced at £5.95. Four of us ordered 12 different dishes, so we put the kitchen through its paces.

Only one of the dishes - the stir-fried green vegetable kay lang - was any good. Among the starters, fresh salad rolls, usually bundles of vivacity, were tasteless. If shrimp and sliced pork were part of the filling, as it said on the menu, they were not discernible.

A change of oil in the deep-fryer might have helped the soft-shell crab and the deep-fried squid not to taste so old and stale and of nothing but over-used oil.

Chargrilled pork spare ribs with garlic and lemon grass featured greasy, fatty meat, which tasted much older than it should have done. Two of us shrank from the rank, fishy smell of the whole, steamed sea bream, the most expensive dish on the menu at £12.95. Braver souls actually tried it.

Noodle and rice dishes can usually be relied upon to deliver some satisfaction but the stir-fried rice noodles with prawns and pork seemed to have been doused in diluted tomato ketchup, and the special fried rice with egg, Vietnamese sausage, pork and peas squashed into a little white bowl resembled the worst possible definition of leftovers. Tasteless banana fritters were served with poor-quality ice cream.

The "charming and attentive staff" promised by the press release had neither of those attributes but then neither did the dishes "encapsulate Vietnamese cooking from the rustic noodle soups to those that highlight the strong Gallic influence". If you want to, you can hire karaoke equipment in the basement lounge bar. What would you sing?

Saigon Saigon
King Street, London, W6 9NH