Last Updated on September 18, 2026
Street Food Menu Inspired By Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Lunch Lady’
2.5 out of 5.0 starsVietnamese restaurant, Cô Thành in Covent Garden aims to channel the food and energy of ‘The Lunch Lady’, Nguyen Thi Thanh, as featured on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations show in 2009, and who inspired foodie travellers to seek out her Asian street food for themselves.
The original Lunch Lady stall in Saigon occupied a humble alleyway with plastic chairs, serving one daily special on various days of the week: rich broths and fresh ingredients. You will find Vietnamese-style soups and noodle dishes here, but Cô Thành offers a standard three-course menu – with some changing dishes – in a smart West End street. Could Cô Thành live up to the mythology it borrowed from? From our experience, not really.
Service was friendly, but things didn’t go smoothly. Nothing super serious, rather niggles you might dodge next time. The dining environment – sound, furniture, menu graphics – contributed to why orders were misunderstood. What we received wasn’t anything bad, but overall, flavours seemed bland and not banging.
Squeezing into our table, at once we found Cô Thành’s interior of exposed brick, wooden floors and metal tables echoey, the low plastic stools flimsy and felt our neighbours’ ordinary-level conversations were too close. On a market stall, it might feel authentic: here it felt uncomfortable.
The menus brought further sensory overwhelm: brown paper mats with fuzzy russet type in a serif font. Headings assume familiarity with Vietnamese dish names; the tiny blurb didn’t always say outright what things were. For example, ‘baguette’ is buried last in a lengthy description of banh mi that omits to say it’s a sandwich. The Lunch Lady’s ‘like it or lump it’ no-choice would have been easier.
Now re-seated somewhere quieter, we found the QR code to access helpful photographs of some dishes. First on my screen was Bun Bo Hue, a soupy pork bowl.
‘Do you do a chicken version of this?’ I asked, showing her the photo, and by now feeling fatigued by the table change and menu fog. She said yes, they did, and that people liked it. So I asked for that, and some summer rolls with peanut sauce listed on the separate white laminate lunch menu.
To drink, I had a Saigon beer, and my companion had a lime soda – which she was pleased wasn’t made with syrup or overly sweet. The beer went well with this kind of food.
It turns out, squinting at the online menu afterwards, that Cô Thành doesn’t do a chicken version of Bun Bo Hue, the soupy round noodles, after all. Instead, Bun with Nuoc Cham arrived. It wasn’t a chicken version of the dish in the photo I’d shown the server.
This dish had thick white vermicelli with clear fish sauce in a jug to pour, and piled up with cucumber, breadcrumbed chicken and toasted peanuts. The chicken lacked the lemongrass flavour in the description, and there were maybe four chunks. There were plenty of peanuts.
Fortunately, the noodles themselves were very good indeed. Firm texture, not claggy. However, I craved punchier flavours and thicker sauce; the thin fish sauce seemed to disappear.
I’d have liked a little more pork inside the summer rolls; they were mainly filled with noodles, even if the meat is visually prominent.
Unintentionally, I’d ended up with two dishes mostly composed of the same white noodles and clear fish sauce. I remembered after leaving that I’d asked for the summer rolls with peanut dip – which means there’d been a miscommunication with two dishes and not just one.
My companion liked the meat and pâté in her Banh Mi Truyen Thong but said the baguette was too crunchy and dry. We asked them to skip coriander; and yet, here it was.
The Cha Gio spring rolls filled with pork were good enough, but were a third dish with the clear fishy sauce.
Having seen original Lunch Lady dishes on travel blog photos, Cô Thành has big boots, or should I say, big steaming bowls to fill. They’re trading heavily off the back of two legends: Thành’s face adorns the logo and uniforms, Bourdain is name-checked on the menu. He never ate here, so we can only speculate how honoured he’d feel. Sadly, Madame Thanh herself died in late 2025.
For dessert, the photo prompted me to order Kem Chuoi, a homemade banana and coconut ice cream with roasted peanuts and lime zest. The texture was very icy with large crystals, more like a sorbet. Banana fans may enjoy it, and for six pounds today, you won’t find many desserts for less.
My friend had Ca Phe Sua Da Quay, billed as iced Vietnamese dark roast coffee with fritter and condensed milk. It looks fun in the photo but the coffee could have been stronger; condensed milk sank in a blob, you can’t really stir it with the ice in the way. The fritter isn’t sweet or churro-like, rather more like folded deep-fried flatbread.
I wish I’d ordered morning glory as a side and made sure that one of us definitely had a broth. A different server remarked she’d have steered us towards tiramisu or panda jelly red bean dessert. As at Tigermilk, we’d ended up with too many things too similar. If you go yourself, the downstairs dining space looks onto the open kitchen.
Had Cô Thành opened nearer Chinatown or perhaps Camden, they might more easily generate a Saigon street vibe. Given that these days Covent Garden Market houses Chanel and Ladurée rather than Shelly’s Shoes or Cranks, both locale and restaurant interior feel too slick to evoke Thanh’s District 1 bustle.
For casual dining and filling up without spending too much, Cô Thành is a convenient pitstop before hitting the shops again or watching a show.
Cô Thành
16 Henrietta Street
London
WC2E 8QH
Tel: 020 3355 8835
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