Viet Hoa Restaurant, West End

Last Saturday was my birthday so I met with some friends in West End for lunch.  We had not made any specific plans other than to go wherever we felt like on the day.  So when the day came I happened to be feeling like Chinese food, so we decided to go to Viet Hoa, one of the many Vietnamese/Chinese restaurants in West End.  I had been there once or twice before and found it to be comparable to its numerous competitors.  When we got there I felt like something spicy and was disappointed to find no Szechuan dishes on the menu, so I settled on pepper beef with mushrooms, and prawn toast as an entree.  The prawn toast was really quite good.  I'm struggling to think of a time when I have had prawn toast that was as "prawny" as this.  When the pepper beef came, I noticed a distinct lack of mushrooms.  This normally wouldn't be a problem, but the menu specifically stated pepper beef with mushrooms, and I like mushrooms.  There was plenty of bok choy as well as some baby corn.  As for the beef, it had a good level of pepper, but unfortunately lacked any deeper flavours, but was tender and quite palatable.  Anyway, at some point during my meal, I found a small cockroach on one of my pieces of beef.  I think that the proprietors of Viet Hoa should consider themselves lucky.  I could have chucked up a big stink about this, but that's not my nature and to be honest as long as my food tastes OK and doesn't make me sick, I really don't care.  When I pointed out the cockroach to the waitress I felt she was not as apologetic as you would expect in such a situation, but that didn't bother me, as I did not have to pay for my dish.  So for my troubles, I got some great prawn toast, a lackluster pepper beef (supposedly with mushrooms)....... and a cockroach.