Loong Kee

Of the many Vietnamese along Kingsland Road, I decided on this one night as it was closest to a nearby pub. It was Halloween night, and instead of waiting in the queue for over 10mins, I decided to sate my hunger for a cheap quick bite. That was the key. I wasn’t interested in anything fancy, just value for money, reliable and expected quick eat — and Loong Kee delivered on those points.
Service fast and friendly, and even though they hosted huge party downstairs, and customers were still being sat down when I arrived after 22:30 at a still busy house, my dish was served to me in 5 minutes. I opted for the dry vermicelli noodles with lemon grass and grilled chicken, over the other usual phở. Portion was huge, and it came with generous side bowl of sweet vinaigrette. I would preferred more vermicelli noodles, but at least veg was very fresh, abundant and chicken cooked just right. Tasted just like how one would make at home; wholesome, filling and comforting.
Yes, the décor is a bit dated, it isn’t exactly white-​table cloth clean, but like how most street food type of menus at value prices, people just come for the quick yummy bites. If you’re looking for exception service and a more refined interior, you’ll be paying more at the other Vietnamese restaurants on the same street. At similar price points, but slightly better ingredients and taste, the prices will creep closer to £10 per main course.
Overall, for no-​frills wholesome simple dishes, highly recommended, especially for late night bites.

The last restaurant on Kingsland rd, but not the most brilliant one! Cheap prices, but can tell it in the food!

The food here is amazing value, two fab courses for about £12. The only downside is on the weekends because its BYOB other customers can be quite rowdy and loud and make it hard to have a conversation with your table. Quick service and really delicious.

The best of the «kingsland rd Vietnamese». Although it hasn’t been as good since they took over the next door and added all the extra seats a few years back. Think it was around the time shoreditch took a turn for the worse. The phở never tasted quite the same after that.

2-​stars because of the rice? Get a grip. This place is great.
There are so many different dishes on offer, and I have sampled maybe 10% of them in the 5 – 6 time I have been to Loong Kee. What they all have in common is incredible freshness, attention-​to-​detail and rustic authenticity.
I will stalk the chef to find out the ingredient of the papaya salad here — it is incredible.
This is my go-​to Vietnamese on Kingsland Road. Highly recommended!

Authentic Vietnamese cuisine at this Shoreditch restaurant, right off the Hoxton tube stop. I recommend the streamed rolls with prawn, works rolls, aubergine with minced pork and pork sauce, and Vietnamese pancake with prawns.

Very happy dining at this place. The place quite nice. The food was cheap and the amount of food was large. The service was also very pleasant and I will happily return. I’m Vietnamese and I can recommend this place.

Solidly solid Vietnamese at the far end of Kingston road. Perhaps not the greatest, and an odd, claustrophobia-​inducing layout, but a variety of folk here sampling pretty decent dishes.
We only had a bowl of Phở and a bowl of Bun — staples to fill our bellies, but both were well-​executed, big, fresh, and solid. Perhaps a touch thin on the broth end, but cheap.
Also, BYO.
They lose a star — and business — though, as they charge £2.30 for boiled rice. This means that the reasonable dishes are bloody expensive.
Now, I know they need to make a living, but it’s rice. About 20p worth. Maybe 23p including the gas and water to cook it. Come on.

I always have the same thing when I go here: steamed rolls followed by the braised pork in a clay pot with steamed rice, all of which are really excellent. If you go here, try the aforementioned pork, it’s AMAZING!

Having been tempted away from my usual favourite Vietnamese place with some trepidation, I was nervous about Loong Kee.
However, I was absolutely won over. Our waiters were adorable and funny, and my tofu was ridiculously delicious. It was if it is possible: creamy! I’ve now been multiple times and each time have fallen mad in love again and again. There’s less of a buzzy atmosphere which can be a little disappointing, especially in the basement where it can feel a little lonely, but the food makes up for all of that.

Brilliant! One of my favorite restaurants, tasty, fresh, plentiful and healthy food. I have tried all the Vietnamese restaurants on this road and i think this one is the best. I would recommend only ordering from the Vietnamese menu the Cantonese is not their forte. Service is brisk and friendly, what you would expect for the budget price, and its a bonus you can bring your own drinks with no corkage charge.

When you feel like Vietnamese, it is a safe bet to come to Kingsland Road and visit one of the restaurants there. We had been to a couple of good restaurants which we were pleased with, but thought we would extend our list. This place is just down the road from Song Que and looked like a good option.
We arrived and we were seated at a tight table right next to another group, which seemed weird as there was plenty of room in the rest of the restaurant. The place quickly filled up and was actually full by the time we left.
The food itself was good, but just not as good as the other places we have been to so far. The beef in my phở was a little tough, but the soup itself was so nice. I had a bit of a cold going at the time, and this was a nice treat to help clear my sinuses.
My rating of 3 reflects that it’s A-​OK, but not as good as the other options around.

Last weekend saw our little supper club 9 strong and heading over to Hackney for a Saturday night feast at Loong Kee. After a couple of beers at The Dove, which was a very pleasant pub and comes highly recommended, we wandered a couple of minutes down the road to the brightly lit restaurant. Fortunately we had taken the precaution of booking because at 8.30pm Loong Kee was absolutely heaving.
It was all hustle and bustle, and fairly chaotic, but we were soon found a table in the basement area (like a lot of basement rooms this one had a bit of a musty whiff about it which the owners had tried to ward off with incense not so bad that it would put you off your dinner but worth noting if you have a sensitive nose). Menus and jugs of tap water soon arrived as did glasses for the beer and wine we had brought with us; no corkage charge here if bring your own.
Service was friendly if a bit hit and miss all night, but we kind of expected that on a very busy Saturday night. You might need to work on catching the eye of passing staff if you want to order or they have forgotten any dishes.
Various different starters were ordered and most were met with nods and smiles of approval. I particularly liked the soft shelled crab with salt and chilli which went down a treat. I ordered 12 of the pork and shrimp steamed rolls, a classic Vietnamese dish of stuffed steamed rice batter, which I shared with the group. Now these were certainly not to everyone’s taste, but when teamed up with the accompanying dipping sauce I thought they were very tasty and I would recommend that you give them a try.
By now the wine was flowing and conversations were getting louder and more heated throughout the restaurant; all good fun if you are with a group but I would probably give Loong Kee a bit of a wide berth if you are looking for a romantic Saturday night supper.
Without too much of a wait our mains began arriving in a fairly random and haphazard fashion. No worries though as we were all in a very good mood by this point in the evening and we tucked into anything and everything that arrived. My main of the Hanoi Grilled Fish was a real winner; crispy, full of flavour and pretty authentic I liked this dish a lot. B had the duck which was tasty, had been well cooked and was just the right shade of pink. Various different noodle and rice combinations were tried and all seemed to go down very well.
When the time came to pay the bill we were all more than happy to stump up our share. The starters and mains are all very reasonably priced and if you bring your own wine you will have the pleasure of a very cheap, very tasty supper. It’s not somewhere I would recommend for a special occasion but it’s a great place to eat with a bunch of pals at the weekend or for a quieter experience, come and fill your boots with quality Vietnamese cuisine on a mid-​week evening.

In terms of value for money, Loong Kee’s definitely one of the better Vietnamese restaurants in this part of town (namely because this place allows you to BYOB, if I recall correctly). In terms of service, though, this place is sadly lacking. I’d give it four stars if you’re looking for a cheap place to fill up, and three stars for service.
The Banh Cuon (meat rolls) is pretty amazing. A small dish consists of nine or ten rolls (I lost count). The shallots which adorn this dish are very nice, so much so that my friend requested for additional shallots, and we got a whole bowl full.
The crispy friend tilapia was delicious, but the fried glass noodle with unagi was just about so-​so.
This is a popular destination. Even on Saturday, when it was pouring down, there was always a queue out the door. This was not good for us; our table was seated near the door and we were freezing throughout!

This lace is definitely good value for money. In the evenings it is understandably packed and their mix of Chinese and Vietnamese cooking makes for a slightly different slice compared to the rest o the Vietnamese restos on Kingsland Rd.
I needn’t repeat what everyone else is saying but its definitely worth checking out. The sizzling hanoi fish dish is to die for!

I went here for a quick lunch and it took over an hour for them to get it to me! I had to watch all my friends eating while I constanly asked for passing waiters where my food was. Sad because when the food actually came it was quite good but I would not go back here due to the terrible service (they actually said that they gave my order to a different table when I reminded them about it).

Oh Que Viet, why were you closed for a wedding reception last night?!
You forced us away into the Vietnamese Wilderness that is Kingsland Road and we ended up in… Loong Kee.
Hmm… what good thing can I say about Loong Kee? Well it was BYO.
The food as Fred J. had described was largely stodgy and flavourless and I was sorely disappointed by my grilled monkfish with fixings (usually SOOOOO good at Que Viet). The bowls of phở were massive though and everyone managed to eat most of their food, so I will go for «it is not disgusting, but hardly amazing either».
The waitstaff were rather inattentive and ½ the table’s food arrived when we basically finished our meal and the toilet were apparently disgusting– I didn’t get to go coz the men’s was blocked and 2 people were having a conversation in the ladies for like most of our meal.
We did have a fun britpop quiz and talked at large about tv shows. And obviously I enthused about R patz and how the word «dazzling» pisses me off nowadays.
Thank gods that the quality of conversations are not affected by the quality of restaurants.

I had a great time dining at Loong Kee. After pouring through the thousands of reviews on Vietnamese restaurants along Kingsland Road, this is where I elected to bring my boyfriend at the time for his first introduction to Vietnamese cuisine — he’s pretty discerning and picky, so I wanted to make sure we went somewhere stellar — and I’m happy to say that neither one of us left disappointed.
As a starter, I had the steamed spring rolls and he had some kind of sesame cracker-​looking thing topped with prawns, which he said was marvelous. As a main I had a soup with noodles and tofu and he had the phở… when we ordered he was a bit concerned that a «bowl of soup» wouldn’t be enough, but when he saw the massive terrines they arrived in — his concerns were allayed.
The ingredients were all top-​notch and the vegetables, especially, seemed fresh. The boyfriend couldn’t believe the amazing flavour of the phở, and I felt my work had been in done in converting him to a new cuisine and a new dish.
The service was very friendly and our food came out quickly. The overall value for money was unbelievably fantastic… but note that it’s BYOB — so we arrived with a chilled bottle of Sauvignon.
In a funny aside, our server, Ben, who it turned out was the son of the owner, approached my boyfriend while he was standing outside, waiting for me to finish washing up. After a bit of chit chat he suddenly blurted out, «Are you dating her?»
«Yes,» my boyfriend replied.
«Is she your girlfriend?»
«Yes,» he assured him, «she is.»
«YOU,» Ben said pointing at him, «are LUCKY,» not without some reproach.
Ha… I laughed then, but especially now because said-​boyfriend really should have taken heed. Yes, Ben, he *was* lucky — very lucky indeed.

Loong Kee is technically the furthest vietnamese restaurant from old st and many travel past an array of others to get here. It’s not the worst of the bunch, but it’s definitely not the best.
Most of the food has a cantonese-​esque feel to it, tisn’t what I’d call authentic vietnamese. The pork vermicelli is really good though, and I’m quite fond of the chilli beef noodles.
It’s pretty darn tasty grub they serve here but just because it’s full, it don’t mean it’s the best. Walk back a few steps to try out Mein Tey if you’re looking for a more authentic taste.

Loong Kee Café is on that stretch of Kingsland Road some call Little Hanoi. Approaching it from Old Street, it is beyond most of the other Vietnamese cafés and just before the Geffrye Museaum
It would be good to make any to the area visit as an outing for the day and also see the Geffrye Museum. Its is interesting to see English middle-​class domestic interiors from Elizabethan times in the almshouse that houses the museum.
In the evening the Loong Kee Café’s plainly decorated room with canteen-​style unadorned wooden furniture is packed with groups of young people appreciating the sprightliness and healthiness of the inexpensive food (most dishes £5 or under) and the economical (Buy Your Own) beer and wine.
I actually wanted to try Banh Cuon Thit as apparently this rice flour pancake rolled around, in this instance, minced pork and mushrooms, is not easily found and is considered to be a speciality of Loong Kee.
In looks and slippery texture it is similar to the dim sum called Cheung-​Fun but is even more unwieldy when approached with chopsticks. A sweet crunchiness was sprinkled on top which seemed like a faint rendition of the traditional fried shallots but tasted good nevertheless. It is worth ordering, not least for leading you towards the list entitled Special Vietnamese Dishes.
One of the dishes I chose was Cha Chien, a Vietnamese sausage which my friend Lesley said tasted divine and perhaps some chain stores should consider introducing this item as regular purchase alongside the usual offerings.
The soups we went for, Wonton with Vegetables and hot and sour Tofu, were both generously served (at £2 each) and tastefully prepared.
Softshell crab with salt and chilli was better here than in far grander places where I have eaten it. Slow cooking breaking down the connective tissue in meat was perfectly demonstrated in Vietnamese stewed beef served in a covered clay pot. The meat, smothered in a rich reddish sauce, was softer than the most tender fillet. Rice and noodle assemblies were less creatively prepared, better for quick one-​dish meals when eating alone.
We asked for the Pak Choi with garlic that we saw our fellow diners eating and were pleased to have a huge heap of some cooked but still chewy greenery along with the salad and fresh herb garnishes of other dishes. A big bowl of dipping sauce is put on each table and fish sauce, soya sauce and a pot of crushed chillies are also provided. Everything was so neat and creatively laid out-​nice for one off treat– occasional dining and that type of thing.