Non Viet

536 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow

0141 332 2975

Lunch/Dinner: £8-£25

Food rating: 8/10

THE menu at Non Viet unfolds like a concertina. Just when you think you’ve scrolled through all the sections – rolls, chargrills, pancakes, platters, crispy this and that, curries, sizzling dishes, lemongrass and chilli specialities, slow-cooked, soups, noodles, stir-fries, rice, salads – you come upon another one. I just can’t keep this amount of information in my head, so I go through the menu again, this time jotting down on a paper napkin a list of everything we fancy.

By the time our helpful non-Vietnamese waitress decides it’s appropriate to ask whether we’ve decided what we’d like to eat, my list is way too long, so we have to narrow it down. “Can I help you with the menu?” she asks. She sees that we’re making heavy weather of it, but before she weighs in, she asks a sensible question: “How Vietnamese do you want to go?” Very Vietnamese, we reply. We’ve been to Vietnam and want to make sure that the "Non" in the restaurant name doesn’t mean "not very Viet".

At the end of our meal, a charming Vietnamese proprietor from Hanoi comes by to ask us how our meal has been. I tell her we’re very happy with what we had. I should have added that considering that this is Glasgow, not Saigon, Danang, or Hue, I think they’re doing a pretty good job. She volunteers that there are some problems sourcing truly Vietnamese ingredients, but they do their best. I guess she’s talking about fresh vegetables. Anyone who has visited Vietnam will know that food arrives in a profusion of ultra-fresh greenery, a quality of fresh produce that even a sophisticated city like Glasgow with its well-stocked Asian supermarkets can’t furnish.

As it happens, the one dish at Non Viet that disappoints is Vietnam’s most famous dish, pho, that’s noodles in broth. Here they make their own broth from beef and chicken bones and use fresh rice noodles. We choose the one with slices of rare sirloin, which "cook" to immaculate tenderness in the heat of the bowl. There’s spring onion in the soup, but what’s lacking is the leafy herbs (rau thom, literally translated as fragrant leaves) – coriander, various types of basil, and most essential, mint – that you’d get in Vietnam to stir into the soup. Even in Scotland, Non Viet could do better on the fresh herb front, but otherwise the pho here is much better than the usual cack-handed occidental effort, and there are culinary excitements to come. So there are eight stuffed betel leaves, beautifully crisp, almost lacy and blistered, filled with green-flecked minced pork. They sit under a rubble of toasted peanuts, cold vermicelli noodles, a vivid fresh salad (crisp lettuce, grated carrot, celery leaf, spinach, radicchio) that’s doused in something decisively hot and sweet; there’s also lime juice and fish sauce dip with fresh chilli floating in it to dress the noodles. This £8’s worth of veritable Vietnamese food makes a meal in itself. I’ll be back to have it for lunch.

There are lots of women in Non Viet’s kitchen, which wafts steamy rice perfume. Each clang of the kitchen service bell hails another wave of exotic aromas as dishes are delivered to tables. Vietnamese food is healthy and colourful, the opposite of beige. Sesame seed-coated summer rolls, stuffed with lettuce, carrot, chunky prawns, rice noodle, have the requisite sticky grip and fresh, varied textures that contrast so well with their thick peanut dip. Our lemongrass and chilli-dressed vermicelli noodle dish with its slippy crunch and cooked/raw contrasts unites salad with stir-fry. Roasted peanuts and crisp-fried shallots add further textural accents and deeply savoury dimension. This dish illustrates the vivacity of Vietnamese dressings; they would make cardboard taste good.

We scarcely need the pork belly and egg slowly cooked in caramel fish sauce and coconut water, but one taste of the near dissolving meat with its creamy fat, and you just have to keep going, especially when there’s suitably sticky rice to go with it.

This is a well-tended, well-run restaurant serving Vietnamese food that’s pretty authentic. As in Vietnam, every mouthful gives you a different combination of deliciousness.