V.N Cafe in Haringey

A good friend treated me to a belated birthday meal and I wish she had saved the £80 she ended up spending. Unfortunately the food wasn’t great! The salted squid dish arrived cold, around 10 mins after the satay chicken was delivered. It would have been nice to have had all the starters on the table at the same time. The chicken satay was good, but it’s hard to mess that up! For mains, the mango salad was ordered along with rice noodles, sizzling chicken in black bean sauce and the fish with dill. The chicken was chewy and the sauce tasteless, some of the mangoes in the salad still had their skin on and the fish came with an after taste which made them inedible, eaten begrudgingly by my friend who was hungry, I couldn’t. We spoke to the management who took the defensive and blamed Waitrose- where the mangoes had been bought and told us the fish tasted exactly as it should. He was so rude, I asked for the service charge to be removed from the bill. And I don’t like to do this as I know how the hospitality industry is struggling, but this guy insinuated we were to blame for the food not being up to scratch . Such a shame as we were both looking forward to visiting this restaurant, that my friend had frequented approx 15 years ago and had raved about over the last few months. For a well established, long running restaurant this was disappointing and maybe the owners need to take customer feedback more seriously. Apologies to the nice young lady who served us who was disadvantaged from the removal of the service charge due to the extremely rude head waiter/ owner.

Not cheap, but very tasty and good portion sizes.