Cay Tre, 301 Old Street, London EC1 (020 7729 8662).
Meal for two, including drinks and service, £40
I am a sucker for tableside service. Lumps of bloody fillet carved under my nose? Yes please. Caesar salad assembled at my elbow? Why not? Pancakes, fish - damn it, anything - drenched in burning booze? Bring it on. The scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams where a talking beast is brought to the table to propose its most succulent bits for dinner might be overdoing it, but, you know, only a little.
I fully recognise the contrariness of this fetish. One of the points of restaurants is that, in return for payment, you should be spared not only the labour of making your own dinner but also the guilt of seeing anybody else do it for you. The irony is that fancy pants tableside service tends to be more a feature of top-end places, which suggests that the more you pay the more you are likely to see.
Cay Tre, a wondrous Vietnamese cafe in Hoxton, just on the fringes of the City of London, subverts all of this. Choose carefully and almost the entirety of your meal will be finished tableside. Plus it's dirt cheap. True, Cay Tre is not much to look at - two floors full of tables and chairs - and the background music is more than on nodding terms with tacky, but frankly I was too intrigued by the business going on in front of me to care.
Vietnamese food is the sum of the influences upon it, with a dash of something else. So there are Indian spicing elements, and then the mark of the Chinese in stir fries, plus a bunch of things that are all their own: the use of fish sauces instead of soy; the ubiquity of rice noodles; the fragrant burst of fresh green herbs. One of our starters, La Vong grilled fish, managed to combine all of this. A gas burner was brought to the table holding a frying pan which contained pieces of monkfish marinated in galangal and saffron and buried under mountains of dill and spring onions. The fish was sauteed in front of us while the waitress built bowls containing rice noodles slicked with a pungent fermented rice sauce, plus peanuts and slivers of vinegared spring onion and chilli. The physical drama is fabulous, the flavours intense and equally dramatic: first the ripe saltiness of the fish, then the burst of dill. Next, a bowl of pho, the classic Vietnamese noodle soup heavy with fresh herbs and slivers of tender beef, was both soothing and thrilling.
Campfire sirloin steak was also a fine performance: a clay pot arrived closed and sizzling. The waitress ignited a pool of alcohol on the plate beneath so it sizzled even more. Eventually, we opened the pot to get a hit of something dense and dark and sweet and savoury, a sticky meaty stew that will have you scraping the bowl to get the last bits. Meanwhile our waitress was still labouring on our behalf, filleting a chunky whole mackerel which had been rubbed with a lemon grass paste and then baked long and hard (the only language mackerel understands), until the skin was crisp and salty, and the dense, oily flesh was heavy with the flavours that had been foisted upon it. We also liked a peppery duck salad, heavy with tender meat, and a plateful of glassy noodles and crabmeat, mined with fragrant knotweed, even though the waitress just put them on the table.
At £20 a head, including drinks and service, this lot, frankly, felt like larceny. And there was no extra charge for the table theatre. Personally, I think they should sell tickets.
