Lemon Grass Restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, with its charming ceiling of umbrellas, is well rated in a couple of guide books and obviously gets a lot of tourists sent on from nearby hotels. The food is just decent but  if it was in Sydney I would consider it seriously under-flavoured. So by local standards the chefs must have done some serious dumbing down to get this kind of nondescript taste from the zingy local produce and cuisine.

By contrast the very ordinary laminex tables of the chain Pho 24 promise nothing in particularly but succeed brilliantly at delivering fresh herbful bowls of steaming Pho Ga and Pho Bo on the double at a pittance. The springs rolls are terrific and the whole thing is delivered with cheerful good humour. Make a beeline, make two beelines!