MOC Kitchen – Vietnamese, Charing Cross

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ll know that I love Vietnamese food. I’m excited to introduce to you a fun new place to go for it. MOC Kitchen has opened recently in Charing Cross and is a super casual eatery with a takeaway offering too. It’s the first restaurant venture by Ms Lan Nguyen from Hanoi who aims to bring fresh Vietnamese food from scratch to the London market, using lesser known Vietnamese herbs and ingredients, many of which, I was told, have medicinal properties!

The impossible oxymoron of getting healthy whilst stuffing myself appealed to me, so I went to check it out last month at a blogger dinner. The table was spread with a host of herbs that I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t recognise such as the Wild Betel Leaf (a mild stimulant!), Vietnamese Mint and Rice Paddy Herb!

 

The menu was moderately sized and ranged from fresh and crispy rolls, fresh Vietnamese salads and various curries. I loved their prawn summer rolls – these are great to eat when it gets hot like this and were jam packed full of fragrant herbs. Their rare beef salad with herbs and a sweet, sour sauce was also really pleasing; zingy and achingly fresh. Their Pho was decent and came with a large platter of more fresh herbs and bean sprouts. I was less taken with the beef coconut curry which, simply put, wasn’t special. More yummy was their ‘cha ca fish’; a marinated and grilled monkfish with Vietnamese dill and peanut. Monkfish is a difficult fish to get right, and they did it justice here.