Green Papaya

Good food for such an amazing value!
Staff is friendly and attentive. Been here twice within a month and it’s probably my favourite go to spot. The soft shell crab appetiser and summer rolls are really good too.

Huge disappointment!!! Staff was friendly and we sat right away. We ordered prawn crackers which were stale. Next spring rolls that had barely any filling and were far too greasy and hard. Tasted like they were from the frozen section of a grocery store. Main dishes (one chicken and one beef) smelled nauseating, were slimy with little taste, and didn’t taste fresh at all. Seemed to have been reheated. Neither my boyfriend or I ate more than a few bites. Waitress was friendly but clearly overrun as all tables seemed to be getting impatient. The worst food I’ve had all summer…

Visited here before a trip to the Hackney Empire to see a surprisingly excellent Lenny Henry in «Rudy’s Rare Records». Anyway we had prawns with ginger and garlic, chicken with lemongrass, egg fried rice, and a large plate of special noodles — all delicious and under £30.

We come here quite often but the broths and sauces can be quite salty. Sometimes they’re REALLY salty. Last time we went everything was so salty we had trouble finishing some dishes and we passed out for the night right when we got home. However, I still enjoy this place and will make it a point to request little to no salt next time we go.
Great items:
–Spicy Fish Fillets with Salt, Garlic & Chilli (£5.95) — perfectly deep fried little pieces of white fish with a great complementary seasoning. Surprisingly, this is not that salty even though it says «salt» in the description!
–Lamb cubes starter (don’t remember the price. It’s on the Specials menu) — I never really put lamb and Vietnamese cuisine together, but this dish is great
Good items:
— Slow Cooked Belly of Pork with Mushrooms & dried winter Vegetables (£7.50) — pork belly is really tender and sauce is super flavorful but we’ve stopped getting it recently because sometimes the pork is too fatty and/​or the sauce is really salty
— Stir Fried King Prawn with Ginger, Spring Onion & Lemon Grass (£8.95) — every time we’ve ordered this it has come out looking different than the time before. Don’t know why but it still tastes good
–Stir Fried Rice with Pork, Prawns & Chicken (£6.30) — pretty good. It’s ground pork not whole pieces of pork.
–Stir Fried Fresh Noodles with Bean Sprouts (£4.50) — simple and delicious. Sometimes really salty
–Rice Stick Noodle Soup with Rare Beef (phở) (£7.20) — really generous with the beef portions. Soup is pretty good but again, quite salty (noticing a theme here??)
Wouldn’t order again:
–Stir Fried Beef with Tomatoes, Spring Onions & Purple Basil (£6.95) — not sure about the tomatoes
–Stir Fried Chicken Breast with a Hot/​Sour Sauce, La Lot & Purple Basil (£7.50) — was very different. It was in this yellow sauce and had a very particular taste
–Stir Fried Chicken Breast with Kohl Rabi, Black Fungi & Shitaki Mushrooms (£6.95) –the mushrooms were nice but the overall taste wasn’t memorable and it was salty.
I’ve never written the word «salty» so many times in such a short amount of time. I think you get the point. Beware if you don’t have water readily available or have high blood pressure.

Our favourite Vietnamese in Hackney, consistently good food, reasonably priced. We took our friends here for dinner on Friday night — it’s lucky we did call up before to push the table back as they had no record of the booking we made earlier in the week. The starters were all wonderfully zingy and fresh, the chicken wings, prawns and squid with purple basil sauce — mmm. We shared 4 mains, the pick of the bunch being the rice noodles with BBQ pork belly. Total bill was £70 including a bottle of white wine. I’ve never had anything but a great meal here — check it out people.

fantastic vietnamese restaurant! friendly stuff, lots of vegetarian/​vegan options and it’s cheap too! you really can’t ask for more!

After reading the reviews, I was so excited to try out a new Vietnamese restaurant different from the ones on Kingsland Road. I ordered the chicken phở and the presentation and portion was great… the Taste was Non Existent. Couldn’t even try to add flavor with the usual hoisin sauce because they don’t serve it. They explained they want to be different from other restaurants by not providing hoisin sauce as a condiment. The hot sauce wasn’t even sriracha, it was the Encona brand you see at Tesco. Not to say sriracha hot sauce isn’t sold at Tesco, but why not provide a hot sauce that is meant to complement the food? The flavor of the soup was bad. Also ordered the Seafood Hot Pot. I kept tasting it, thinking it would taste better if I taste another type of seafood… it just kept getting worse. To put it into words, it tasted like it came out of the frozen foods section out of the freezer aisle in a grocery market. The soup tasted bad and there was no flavor to the seafood. Just tasted like it was thawed and thrown in. Friend ordered the tofu dish (she’s vegetarian), ate a couple bites and didn’t finish it. Tasted like it was old and reheated from frozen foods as well. The flavor just did not taste like it was made in a kitchen… more like a factory. The only decent thing was the Summer Roll. No complaints there… it was good and original. Also, the staff is nice and friendly.
We were very disappointed with the meal so we went to get pizza.

My favourite restaurant in London, without any exception. The best Vietnamese food perhaps in the entire country. And service with a smile.
Oh, and it’s really really cheap too. Get a variety of dishes to share and you will not be disappointed. For me, their best dish is bahm tom, which I have not seen anywhere else in the capital (and when I ask for it, I get shrugs). It’s basically shredded sweet potato surrounding some prawns (as though the potato is a nest), which is then deep-​fried. It is the most exquisite thing I have tasted. I tend to pig out on these big time. Their rice is lovely and sticky, and their giant garlic and chilli prawns, OMG! Mark, who runs the gaff, is also a wonderful host.
It’s cheap, it’s cheerful, and it’s been running for years and years. Also a bit of a celebrity haunt. I once saw Chris Smith MP with his boyfriend Dorian there, while he was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Do you need any more endorsement than that?

Decent if not amazing.
I always find it suspicious when ordering in a restaurant if the food arrives before the bar staff manage to pour our drinks — is it all sitting in a big pot out the back?
If so, could I get the same thing far cheaper at Camden market? Probably.
For convenience though, Green Papaya seems a good one to pick among the many that populate this side of Mare Street.

Great food, and very cheap. Recommend the duck, very tasty, also the pancakes.
Have eaten here many times and taken takeaway too, would recommend.

By far the best Vietnamese restaurant I’ve been to in East London. My friends and I go back repeatedly, and every dish I have tried has been mouth-​wateringly brilliant.
The prices are incredibly reasonable, and the staff are friendly, attentive and helpful– a world apart from the service you usually get in Vietnamese restaurants!
I would thoroughly recommend the Green Papaya, I cannot fault it in any way.
PS. The spicy squid rings are DIVINE!

This is quite a decent Vietnamese with a pleasant atmosphere and friendly service. The food is good, although not outstanding. We had a variety of vegetarian dishes, out of which the smoked tofu was quite unusual and I liked it a lot, while the rest of the food was average. Prices are decent.

I have a fond hope that the Vietnamese restaurants on Mare St may be cheaper and somehow more authentic than their Kingsland brethern. Diamonds in the rough as it were. However, despite trying several of them to date (more reviews to follow) I have yet to find anything that matches Tay Do Café or Sou Que to the South. Green Papaya is another disappointment. They offer a pretty decent menu, and the décor is nice, and the service attentive, but the food just doesn’t seem to match. The smoked tofu is nice, but overall the dishes are just a bit bland/​unexciting, and unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be back to give them further chances to prove my first impressions wrong.

I’m going out on a limb here and bumping up Green Papaya from its slew of 3-​star reviews. For a vegetarian, this place is heaven and the food did not disappoint. The highlight of the meal was definitely the smoked tofu (with seasonally appropriate asparagus!), which, by all accounts, tasted and acted like pork. I don’t know how they did what they did to that tofu, but it was nothing short of amazing. When the bill came, we were laughing. 2 starters, 2 mains, a large portion of steamed rice, and 2 drinks for £25?
Yes please, I’ll be back.

If you like tofu this is the place to be — the tofu starter was a totally different world from the tofu served with the mains — and both were equally fab. I also had the pork hotpot which was very good and hot — but more in terms of temperature than the spicy factor. This is not a byob restaurant but the wine is very well priced. I will be back soon. Friendly staff and well-​executed dishes.

I was the other half of Vicky L’s dinner date. Her and Her reviews. We were recommended Green Papaya as we were told it had a fair amount of vegetarian dishes for a non seafood and pork eating urchin like myself.
It was also described as a ‘trendy Vietnamese’. Although pleasant enough inside and full of Hackney hipsters, it didn’t seem particularly trend-​worthy, just quite average. When I asked afterwards what was so ‘trendy’ about it, I was informed by my friend it was trendy because unlike other Vietnamese restaurants it had a simplified two sided menu instead of a bible sized menu. Eh?
Usually I am indecisive about what to order, and would welcome this simplification but I have to admit nothing on the menu really struck me. There was indeed a decent sized vegetarian section (although not to the length I was led to believe), and I settled for a vegetarian curry which was palatable but not particularly striking. Vicky L and I shared ‘fragrant rice’ which did smell really good, and some garlic pak choi too. Meh aussi.
Do not get me wrong, it was a decent enough meal, but not anywhere special I’d rush to go to again. Martina O gets it to a T — «it wasn’t the most amazing meal I have ever had in my life but it wasn’t bad either!».
It wasn’t bad. Hardly the most enticing reason to make your way to Mare Street to go eat there especially, but I wouldn’t say no if I was super hungry and passing by.
Sadly this is no where near as good as Que Viet on Kingsland Road. I’m sure that in their bible length menu (old and new testament combined), there is sure to be something to please the most picky pesky-​tarian eater.

We went to get a take away and ended up eating in. The staff were attentive enough, but distracted.
Ahh the food… it was amazing compared to the gaggable experience I had this afternoon, but fell short of the mark set by other restaurants in the East London Massive. Bit… meh.
I had fish cakes with morning glory which was enjoyable but one dimensional (ie salty); Z had some veggie curry that didn’t sound amazing from her description and we shared some garlicky pak choi which was again, one dimensional and rather too gloopy.
Much rathered have spent only £6 here.
Meh.

What separates the Green papaya from the other Vietnamese restaurants on Mare St. is the fact that whole dining in experience is a little more sophisticated. The interior design is quite minimalistic and contemporary, which I find this makes a big difference to the overall experience. The service is relaxed yet personal, the tempo of the place is not too hectic, and the ambience is pleasant.
The music is also something that is not akin to the other Vietnamese restaurants in the area. They seem to play and interesting mix of Eastern and Western music. A few charming early Beatles tunes went down well, putting everyone in good spirits.
The food is delectable and well priced. I tried a beef and olive dish, as it is not something that you see on every Vietnamese menu. I was happy with my choice as it turned out to be a winning combination of ingredients.

Located on the busy Mare Street in Hackney, Green Papaya is my local Vietnamese Restaurant. Small and cosy inside, the restaurant is filled with simple wooden tables & chairs, and the cheerful, warm atmosphere make it a popular choice.
A blackboard displays the day’s specials, and the bar is usually well stocked with a decent selection of wine and beer. As a vegetarian I often have problems with menus catering more for meat eaters. Green Papaya, as you would expect, has a great selection for veggies, a variety of seafood, tofu, veg, as well as meat dishes, enough to keep everyone happy.
It’s relaxed atmosphere makes for quite a refreshing change from some of the busier Shoreditch restaurants, but the small portion sizes are disappointing, and frankly, the Green Papaya salad isn’t much to write home about.

I came here recently and ordered the tofu in tomato sauce! it wasn’t the most amazing meal I have ever had in my life but it wasn’t bad either!
The fried crispy squid which is served with a strange basil sauce is an interesting and tasty combination. I also saw a banana salad on the menu which I am going to try the next time I go there!