Dragon-Phenix - Saint-Pol-de-Léon

It is a Monday night and not a lot open in the town. After 6 weeks in France we fancied a Chinese but have not had very successful experiences of this in the past. Menu was really cheap. 12 euros 50 for 3 courses. You had about 4 options for each course. I knew it was going to be good when my soup saigonaise was put in front of me. The clearest of broths with fresh vegetables, noodles and a prawn or two. My dad had the chicken salad which had a nice sesame dressing, mum had the samosas and my husband had the crispy wonton. Delicious. We were all very happy with our mains too. The chicken curry tasted very much like a Chinese curry at home. I had the banana fritter for dessert, all crisp and yummy. The lady who I presumed is the owner spoke excellent English and was extremely helpful and smiley. Perhaps not everyone would agree that it warrants a 5 star rating but my measure is how likely I am to return and I most definitely would.

Sadly, this very lavishly decorated, Vietnamese restaurant was a disappointment. I blithely assumed it would be as good as the Vietnamese restaurants in Paris, that I used to frequent as a student, given France's colonial history with Vietnam. OK, so it was cheap: 12€ for the 3-course set dinner. However, after a tolerable starter of nems and a chicken salad (with no bean sprouts, which one would expect... , our two main courses were appalling. The meat (pork in one dish, and beef in the other was so tough, it was almost inedible, and the sauces tasted rater peculiar, so we left most of it, obviously to the surprise of the waitress. The desserts were acceptable: my banana fritters were quite crispy, but it's hard to go wrong with ice cream, which my husband was reduced to choosing. The jasmine tea was a teabag, and not actually identifiable as jasmine tea. It was tasteless for the first two cups, and bitter for the next two. Service was very slow, even though it was relatively quiet when we arrived. We were astonished it filled up quite a lot before we left, as we couldn't believe any self-respecting French person would put up with such poor quality meat, even if they actually had no idea how good Vietnamese food should taste.

Just our bad luck that this should have been our final dinner in France after two weeks of good food. They seemed to have some sizeable takeaway orders so we had to wait a long time before being able to order what we wanted. We asked for a couple of Chinese beers to start with and I had the feeling that the waitress must have walked to China to get them as they took so long to arrive. The soups were OK but when we received the next dish of fried rolls, fried prawn in batter and won tuns the waitress bought us a bowl of lettuce and instructed us to wrap the fried stuff in the lettuce and then dip it in vinegar. Quite frankly at my age I've learned how to eat my food thank you very much and I don't need instructions in how to do it. The two main courses were badly executed and my chicken in satay sauce tasted as though it had been hanging around for some considerable time. The only thing that was reasonably edible was the fried rice. Needless to say we didn't finish our dinner and headed off to a bar for a couple of beers to take the taste away. We have eaten in many Chinese restaurants and we are not that picky but this really wasn't very good.

Decent food, decent drink specialsPrices were fair and the drinks were done nicely.

Often received by Asian restaurants in a little too generalist (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Japanese at a time..)...More