Historical version 12 of Hare And Tortoise, WC1N 1AF (view current version)
- 020 7278 4945
- 11-13 Brunswick Shopping Centre, WC1N 1AF (streetmap) (osm) (gmap) (bingmap) (streetview)
- 12:00 - 23:00 7 Days a Week
Decent enough pan-Asian (with a focus on Japanese) canteen-style restaurant doing relatively cheap food in pretty large portions. Kake only managed about a third of her main course. (They're happy to pack up leftovers for you, but charge 20p for this.)
Service is sometimes a little slow, but is friendly. We also had to queue for about 10 minutes to get a table at 13:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, and again at around 9pm on a Monday evening.
The spicy chicken sticks were underwhelming and not very spicy. The Curry Laksa noodles were very tasty at £5.25. They also now have a sushi menu, with a reasonable choice; the eel nigiri was fine.
Vegetarians are well catered for, with a number of vegetable/tofu dishes available. The tofu is deep-fried, and reasonably tasty. Haven't checked recently about vegan-ness, but I know I ate here when I was vegan --Kake.
The drinks menu is small but varied, including some interesting soft drinks as well as beer, wine, and sake. The plum wine spritzer (£2.30) is rather nice.
Comment added by claud: I am in love with this place, but it is a very temperamental lover. Having been here at least once a month for the last year or so, I've experienced everything from paper in my fried cod to a divine laksa taking me home to Singapore for a moment. There are sometimes 10m queues outside the restaurant on busy nights, and I've been recently told that reservations for groups smaller than 10 cannot be made (but this was on a Saturday evening - try on weekdays). Don't go with high expectations, though, but you can definitely expect great value.
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