Sông Quê Phở Bar, London E1: ‘The best phở in town’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants
Some hot dining spots seem to expand almost the moment they open, but east London’s Vietnamese stalwart Sông Quê has waited almost 25 years to spawn a little sister, Sông Quê Phở Bar.The new offshoot sits on Commercial Street, a mile or so down the road, and serves a tiny menu focusing on phở, as well as a smattering of the original cafe’s small plates in the form of summer rolls, green papaya salad, grilled lamb chops and savoury banh khot cupcakes.Quite why Sông Quê, with its regular weekend queues and well-known name, took so long to branch out, however, is unknown.Still, why rush things? After all, the road to restaurant ruin is paved with premature brand roll-outs, and even if managers think they’re superhuman, they cannot be in two – or three or four – sites all at the same time.Plus, the big question with an institution such as the OG Sông Quê is: can you really recreate the magic elsewhere?The new phở bar has appeared in what at a glance seems a pretty good location, almost directly opposite the much-adored (not least by me) Xian Biang Biang Noodles (go for the belt noodles, I implore you), and close to the beloved Thai hotspot Som Saa.
It’s also just down the road from somewhere called Slurp Thai, but the less said about that name, the better,But is it a good location? The Spitalfields margins, in that sort-of-Aldgate and close-to-Shoreditch area, can be curiously hard to lure passing trade into, so, if I’m honest, I’m actually not so sure,Lauded fish chef Tom Brown opened The Pearly Queen on this very site only a couple of years ago, and that vanished pretty rapidly, and before that it was a Turkish spot called The Space, which made no impact on the London dining scene at all,One Sunday earlier this month, it was also a bit of a concern to find ourselves the only customers at the new phở bar,Beforehand, I’d worried about not having booked a table, only to find we had the pick of the whole restaurant, and on both floors, too.
Still, the staff were bright and chipper, and young enough to tell me, in tones that suggested they were talking about medieval times, that the original Sông Quê opened in 2002; they also seemed genuinely surprised that we had working stoves and electricity way back then.The new place, however, feels more like a canteen that’s there to do one job well: pop by for a bowl of their beef broth noodle soup topped with a choice of beef, beef balls, chicken, prawns or tofu.My rare beef flank phở came thinly sliced, blushingly pink and generously served atop a bowl of thin, al dente noodles and a fistful of chopped spring onion, and all of it drowned in a very meaningful broth.Star anise is a shining light in this rich, sweet, warmly spiced soup.They also do their famous bun bo hue, which is slightly different from the phở in that it features well done beef flank and pork sausage, or spicy prawns or tofu, and is served with loads of fresh herbs.
And if the idea of soup noodles leaves you cold, there’s also a grilled lemongrass chicken and vermicelli dish with gloriously fiery chicken thigh,Those small plates shouldn’t be ignored, either, so we didn’t,We galloped through grilled beef wrapped in betel leaves, scattered with handfuls of chunky peanuts, dressed with a semi-hedgerow of fresh mint and dunked in a hot, sweet dipping sauce,This place does not skimp on its garnishes,We moved on to little juicy bullets of spicy tempura squid flanked by raw chilli, and a serving of those grilled lamb chops that look like nothing much but that have a truly gorgeous char and come with an oddly unobtrusive, vinegar-based dipping sauce that has just the right amount of sharpness to carry the heft of the meat.
It was at this point in the meal – roughly around the time I was devouring those cute little prawn cupcakes that are in fact little more than egg and cornflour moulded into little baskets, but that are jolly nice when dipped in something spicy and sweet – that I began to think: “Where the hell is everyone?” This is a jolly handy little spot, and there’s no way it can survive on midweek office workers alone while losing out at weekends to the likes of Slurp Thai simply because that’s a few blocks closer to Shoreditch’s main drag.This is one of those places where I say: use it or lose it.Right now, they have seats going, so take a friend, or a book, and settle down to the best phở in town.What’s more, if you’re antisocial and like Vietnamese treats, well, right now, Sông Quê will feel like heaven.Sông Quê Phở Bar 44 Commercial Street, London E1, 020-4585 0341.
Open all week, 11.30am-9.30pm.From about £25 a head, plus drinks & service
Criminals ‘systematically’ targeting UK shops, costing £400m last year, say retailers
Criminal gangs are “systematically” targeting shops, retailers have warned, with 5.5m incidents of shoplifting detected last year, costing the industry an estimated £400m.The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has warned over “endemic” violence towards shop workers – who faced an average 36 incidents of violence involving a weapon every day last year – and said high levels of theft was causing “anxiety” among retail staff.Helen Dickinson, the chief executive of the BRC, called on police to consistently prioritise tackling retail crime and commit “dedicated resourcing” to the problem.The BRC research comes after the government put forward new legislation to back a stand-alone offence for assaulting a retail worker and to remove a £200 threshold for “low level” theft, which has a maximum six-month custodial sentence
Crypto exchange Binance may have funded Iranian entities, reports say
Shortly after Donald Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder, last fall, company employees revealed the cryptocurrency exchange may have funded Iranian entities with billions of dollars, according to a report by the New York Times.The discovery was made by a group of internal Binance investigators, who reportedly found that people in Iran had accessed more than 1,500 accounts on the crypto platform. Two of those accounts allegedly saw $1.7bn move to Iranian-backed groups that included Yemen’s Houthi militants throughout 2024 and 2025, according to the Wall Street Journal.The company investigators say they reported those transactions to Binance’s executives, but then were reportedly disciplined
Palantir deals are a threat to our data rights as UK citizens | Letters
For 100 years, the UK government has led us through existential threats, including two world wars. But instead of resisting the latest threat to democratic accountability, it has welcomed it with open arms: Palantir Technologies (NHS deal with AI firm Palantir called into question after officials’ concerns revealed, 12 February).This polarising US surveillance giant provides data-fusion and AI platforms used by by the US for immigration enforcement and by Israel in the Gaza conflict. Its software amplifies state power through militarised analytics and opaque algorithms.The current government hasn’t just surrendered citizens’ data rights to Palantir – it has paid for the privilege
Sam Altman defends AI’s energy toll by saying it also takes a lot to ‘train a human’
The OpenAI boss, Sam Altman, has tried to ease concerns about how much power is used by artificial intelligence models by comparing it to the amount of energy required by human development.“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman told the Indian Express recently while in India for the AI Impact summit. “It takes about 20 years of life – and all the food you consume during that time – before you become smart.”Despite that defense, he said that the public assessment of AI’s energy consumption was “fair”, adding: “We need to move towards nuclear or wind and solar very quickly.”Those remarks come amid growing discussion about the environmental impact of the datacenters required to power AI models – and, more generally, about technology’s possible impact on society
‘Landmark moment’: Emma Lawrence to become first woman to call NRL games
Emma Lawrence will become the first woman in NRL broadcast history to call a game, with Triple M including “one of the sharpest broadcasters in rugby league” on its play-by-play commentary team for the new season.Lawrence, one of the most respected voices in the game, will enter the domain previously reserved for men in a move the radio station called a “landmark moment”. Female voices are present across broader coverage of the NRL, but a woman has never been handed the prestigious play-by-play call before.The move follows other sports which showcase women as lead commentators for men’s matches, including Kelli Underwood on AFL and Isa Guha on cricket.Sports commentator Kate Allman said it was “a win for all women working in commentary and sport broadcasting”
Constitution Hill’s win at Southwell showed the way to a brighter future for racing
There are times when it feels as though the entirety of British horse racing exists in a state of perma-gloom, bewailing an ageing fanbase, declining attendances and a moribund, factional leadership. It is, so the narrative goes, a sport in slow but irreversible decline, waiting for the inevitable moment in 10 or 20 years’ time when someone finally comes along to turn out the lights.However, every now and again, there are moments such as the Friday Night Live! card at Southwell last week which lift the mood completely, and offer hope that a 250-year-old sport has plenty of running left to give.There were grizzled veterans of many decades on the racing beat who were struggling to recall a more uplifting day at any track as they left Southwell on Friday evening. This one certainly was
US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’
Amazon’s cloud ‘hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year’
‘It’s survival of the fittest’: the UK kebab chain seeking an edge with robot slicers
Nascent tech, real fear: how AI anxiety is upending career ambitions
Nvidia reportedly plans to invest $30bn in OpenAI’s next funding round
Mind launches inquiry into AI and mental health after Guardian investigation