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Thanh Binh Vietnamese Restaurant London
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Reviews
Vietnamese in London
- Camden
14 Chalk Farm Road
, Camden, London, NW1 8AG
+44 (0) 20 7267 9820
Thanh Binh Vietnamese Restaurant serve a variety of Vietnamese dishes.
Tags:
vegetarian dishes, vietnamese
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Thanh Binh Vietnamese Restaurant
London
Reviews
So disappointing after 10 years - I've lived in Camden for the past 10 years and this has been my favourite Vietnamese restaurant in all that time, the food was authentic, service fantastic, the owner helpful and chatty and I recommended the place to a lot of my friends who also had a similar experience.
However I'm horrified at how my favourite restaurant has changed beyond all recognition and now it's sadly lost one of its most loyal customers.
I haven't been there for around 6 months but decided to take my in-laws last Friday for a special treat. Straight away we noticed that the menu had changed and that all of our favourite dishes had gone, only to be replaced by generic choices such as "chicken curry with onions", I asked the waiter if the old dishes were still available but he was totally clueless so I tried to get the owner's attention. In stark contrast to every other time I've been there (probably about 120 times over the past 10 years) she refused to come over to the table and eventually blanked me with a wave of her hand as she returned to her counter. A bit shocked and disappointed at this we ordered anyway and waited for the food to arrive. All I can say is that the disappointment didn't end there; the curry looked like it came out of a jar with texture like tomato soup and a few chopped onions, peppers and bits of chicken floating about in it. The spicy Singapore noodles were burnt and the spring rolls were almost empty with thick soggy pastry, my wife’s soup was over salty and was pretty tasteless but spicy. Compared to all the previous times when we've left, congratulating ourselves once again with eating in the best Vietnamese restaurant around, it was very, very sad but nevertheless we decided to finish what we could and have a word with the owner as we left.
That's when they really lost my custom and we encountered the worst Customer Service on record.
We waited for the waiter to clear the table for 25 mins but nothing happened so we left the dirty plates and ventured up to the counter to pay there instead. The owner was clearly flustered but worked out our bill, pushing it towards us together, for some unknown reason, with a calculator. We duly paid and this is EXACTLY how the conversation afterwards went: -
"We were wondering, have you changed chef and the menu in the last 6 months? We've been coming here for about 10 years and we noticed that it's really changed"
"no, same chef, same menu...always been same menu[sic]"
"You used to have a mixed starter, with crab salad, spring rolls, squid cakes, £5 per person, minimum of 2 people?"
"no, nothing changed, you get all that separate, same menu"
As she was saying this she was turning round, wiping surfaces, sticking her head into the fridge under the bar and frantically looking round at other tables and the dumb waiter so my wife asked:-
"Excuse me, would you mind at least looking at me and giving me some attention whilst I'm trying to give you some feedback?"
She carried on wiping, fussing and cleaning her hands but said with a pained expression "You tell me what's wrong and I'll pass it onto the chef?". We listed our issues but before we finished she suddenly stepped back with a pitiful look, pointed to her forehead, shook her head and shouted "very bad headache, very bad, please, please just go away!" before gesturing to the door.
This was the final nail in the coffin; we walked out and informed her that we wouldn't be coming back and also that we were very disappointed because of the fantastic times we'd had previously. Our words fell on deaf ears by the looks of things as she was already pulling more dishes of chicken curry from the dumb waiter.
So all-in-all we're incredibly disappointed, we're definitely not going back and will also be telling all our friends to stay away. We'll now be making another trip back to Viet-Anh on Parkway ASAP (which we haven't been to for such a long time) and will be hoping for a much better experience.
03-05-11
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