Quynh Giao Quan Au Vietnam

There are a few things required to set the context for this restaurant. First, it is on Joo Chiat which by day is a quaint little street lined by traditional shop houses in an upscale neighborhood full of expensive homes. By night, it is a red-​light district replete with KTV joints blasting awful music where working girls throng the streets, and at the very least makes for interesting people watching. Not coincidentally, Joo Chiat also has the cheapest hotels in Singapore (there is a Hotel 81 about every 200 feet) and some of the best food including laksa, phở, nasi padang and Peranakan restaurants can be found in the area. In other words, this is a neighborhood with character.
In addition to the ethnic enclaves that have their own MRT stations, like Chinatown and Little India, other groups have staked their claim to different parts of Singapore. Thais in the Golden Mile complex, Burmese in Peninsula Plaza, and Vietnamese here on Joo Chiat. It is without a doubt the best place in the city for good, cheap Vietnamese food. There are some more upscale gastropub eateries further down toward Marine Parade that are intended to draw the ex-​pats who live in the area, but on this section of Joo Chiat there are only Vietnamese restaurants, karaōke bars, hotels (where rooms can be rented by the hour), and a few local businesses.
In my opinion, the two best Vietnamese restaurants are this one and the more popular Long Phung which is a few paces further down the block. They are both good, especially if you stick with the phở — nice broth, the meat is generally good quality and it’s cheap, around $ 6. I have eaten at both of them many times (always on off-​peak hours because during lunch and dinner they can get stupidly crowded), and I can say that the food is consistently tasty.
The restaurant is not that clean and while the service can be slow and inattentive at times, the people who work here are really nice, especially the husband and wife who run the place and have this adorable little daughter who plays out front with kids from the other shops on the block. These are not things that bother me; in fact, they create this kind of homey environment that I’ve always found to be an especially nice aspect of life in Vietnam. And if you have ever been to Vietnam, you would know this is standard operating procedure for many street corner restaurants (inattentive service, kids everywhere), so it’s not lacking in «authenticity», if you want to call it that.
To me, that’s really why I like this place, and this neighborhood. You can pull up a little yellow plastic chair and just chill out at this restaurant, drink a Tiger beer and watch the girls (who are almost always Vietnamese) stumble by in five inch heels and tacky, shiny skirts that would blow away in the wind. You can get a cheap bowl of phở and just soak in the ambiance. It is the kind of place and the kind of neighborhood that I like; sort of seedy and run down and well worn, but full of interesting things and nice people and totally devoid of pretension. This epitomizes a certain ineffable aspect of living in Asia that is difficult to articulate, and that is really why I like this place, in addition to the tasty phở.