Pleasant and easy with particularly friendly service, Black Ginger has a nice feeling of being your neighbourhood Vietnamese restaurant. The menu is pretty standard in terms of the usual hits: banana blossom salad, various duck dishes, spicy salads, pho, shaken beef, chicken curry. I’m not sure there was anything that stood out as unusual.
But everything we had was tasty. The pho was particularly nice with a slightly sweet broth. I recommend getting a big bowl of that and splitting it among your table. I always like the deep fried spring rolls, the Vietnamese pancake was appropriately crispy and filled with freshly cooked bean sprouts. There were lots of herbs to tear off and add to the various dishes.
Also: BYOB makes it easy to bring your favourite wine (and I thought the bottle shop at the Town Hall Hotel, next to Newtown Station had a great selection at great prices). And the fish tank has some gorgeous fish in it! After, you can go in either direction for ice cream: Cow and Moon if you can get there before 10:30pm, or as we did, get some Turkish ice cream, tasty and strangely sticky.