Viet Grill, London E2

Can anyone explain why there are so many Vietnamese restaurants in Kingsland Road, east London? I counted six of them in a 150-yard stretch, with names like Au Lac and Hanoi Café. Has there been a sudden invasion of middle-class Indochinese into the Shoreditch/Hackney borderland, all of them hungry for a taste of home? Whatever the reason, they're in hot competition now. Can they all be as much of a revelation as the Viet Grill was to me?

Initial impressions weren't great. You can see the Grill's frontage for miles, a horrible plastic, pistachio-green abomination like the Abrakebabra chain of kebab shops in Dublin. Inside, a tiny bar and several blue tubs of nasty foliage masquerade as atmosphere. In a wall-mounted aquarium, enormous white-orange carp slide around each other to get to the fish food. "It's like being in a dentist's waiting-room in Kowloon," said Philip, who is well-travelled and a bit of a show-off.

The menu cheered us up no end, though. Along with the usual seaweed, crab and crispy duck, the two dozen starters offered some real excitements. Quail, for instance, stuffed with agaric mushroom and ground peppered pork, roasted with a honey coating and simmered in lotus-seed broth. Could you resist that? Tragically, it wasn't available that evening, but there was plenty to pique the imagination, like tamarind- and basil-scented crab and something called fluffy grey feather fish. We began to feel a mild panic at the impossibility of trying everything.

We started with bo tung xeo or feudal roasted beef, named, apparently, after an old method of torture by flaying human flesh (charming). It was very flat, very tender and darkly marinated with a "mystery ingredient" that turned out to be horseradish. An odd starter, but explosive. I had to try the banh xeo, or Vietnamese pizza - a big favourite in Saigon - out of curiosity. It was unlike any concoction of dough, tomato and mozzarella I've ever seen. It was a pancake, loosely textured, like soggy Yorkshire pudding, and its modest freight of prawns and chicken fell all over the plate when you tried to cut a slice. Miles distant from standard-issue spring rolls, the steamed "Pho" paper rolls were astonishing: soft, fat pillows of ho fun rice noodle wrapped round a julienne of vegetables with pickles and more tender beef.

Beside us, two diners were having a house speciality, bo nuong cuon banh trang, or beef wrapped in rice paper, grilled at their table - not on a grill, in fact, but on what looked like the cover of a tagine, heated from inside. Very appealing, but we were already awash with meat and ordered the cha ca la vong, the grilled monkfish (they go crazy for it in Hanoi). It's made before your eyes in a small pan full of dill, spring onion and pre-grilled fish, heated and tossed with shrimp sauce and chilli. The fish was steeped in galangal, saffron and "rice ferment" and tasted odd but delicious, like fish-flavoured cheese.

Unable to stop, we ordered vit sot tieu xanh, or baked duck with jalapeno pepper. It was a substantial skinless breast roasted in a rather oily sauce until it was so tender the fibres were separating; the jalapeno peppers were nothing of the kind, but green peppercorns, cooked until mostly flavourless.

Still to come was the oven-roasted turmeric pork rubbed with lemongrass. While we waited, a dish of aubergines appeared (on the house) and mystified us by bearing no resemblance to the things that go into moussaka; they were yellow-green strips, sweet and melting in the mouth. The waitress Chi explained that, at home, they grilled aubergines on all sides for ages, then removed the skin and sliced the result in sweet chilli sauce. Like everything in this restaurant, it was intriguing, unusual and crazily palatable.

A word about service. I have met kindly waitresses, surly waitresses, flirtatious and sour waitresses, chatty and silent ones, bored and bitchy ones. But I've never known a waitress who asked, "Would you like to try something I've made for supper tonight? It isn't on the menu ..." It was chunks of mackerel marinaded in pickles; boldly spiced, hot and (need I say?) nothing like mackerel. Chi talked us through every dish, described what the locals eat back home in Haiphong, and was a foodie enchantress.

You must try the Viet Grill - a restaurant that experiments with a wild variety of dishes, introduces you to some unearthly flavours, fills you up for days and charms the pants off you. The only downside is presentation: some dishes simply look off-puttingly thrown together. But if you're after the true taste of home-cooking from the other side of the world, you need look no further.

Viet Grill, 58 Kingsland Road, London E2, (020-7739 6686), Around £70 for two including wine

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