Graham Greene's Quiet American is set in steamy, 1950s Vietnam. Old Street's Loud American was sat in the corner of Cay Tre on a balmy spring evening in Hoxton. Luckily, for everyone else in the restaurant the food here is so good its impervious to noise pollution.
I started with a fresh, tangy lotus leaf salad with generous slices of pork and tiger prawn and some DIY fun via beef wrapped in rice paper - thin slices of sirloin that you cook on a portable griddle at your table and parcel up inside rice pancakes softened in a bowl of hot water and stuffed with rice vermicelli, pickles and chili fish sauce. Next I had what the menu translated as "Wicked" Frogs legs. They weren't burnt alive at the stake but they were battered and boiled in oil and actually tasted pretty well behaved as well as being abnormally large: think Stuart Pearce's thighs but miniaturised. More Pyscho than wicked.
The unquiet American did have one use: He spent so long talking about the Hannoi Pillows I ordered some. These sweet, crispy dumplings stuffed with crab and minced pork were excellent so I owe him for that though I couldn't help hoping that perhaps he'd move a thousand kilometres south-west and try out the Bangkok Hilton for his next course.
Desserts were tricky. I was torn between the "pyramidal glutinous rice cake" and the Durian and tapioca cake. Thankfully, I had a flashback to the time when a friend brought back some Durian sweets from a trip to Malaysia. The Durian is one of the foulest smelling fruits on the planet and even when processed into sweets the experience of eating it is gag-inducing. So I just imagined ordering it and sending it over to my American friend. Compared to the sticky end that befalls Greene's American he would have probably been getting off lightly.
Cay Tre, 301 Old Street, EC1V 9LA
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