Dinner at Pho Kitch'n taught me the value of NOT going to a restaurant just because you have a coupon.
The ladies' bathroom was very clean, and there was a great sign hanging in there that instructed visitors not to turn off the light. I'll let you discover why not on your own. Also, the server and the hostess were very polite.
As for the restaurant experience...hmmm. I came around 7:30 p.m. on a midweek night, and there were two other tables with customers. It took a very, very long time (about 20 minutes) for anyone to take my order (or even drop off some water), and I was actually considering going to the front desk to buy a can of soda to drink. Finally my server came with some water, so no harm, no foul. That said, the slowness of service was par for the evening. Since there weren't that many customers, it's possible that the backup was in the kitchen rather than with the server, or maybe the server had two sets of duties she had to fulfill. (And another table ended up going to the front to ask for their check, so it wasn't just me who got forgotten.)
All this would be a minor snafu if the food were good. But it wasn't even close to being good...I was shocked. I love Vietnamese food and was expecting a good dinner, especially because a fair number of Yelp reviews rave about Pho Kitch'n. My mistake might have been ordering something other than pho; maybe Pho Kitch'n is good at pho. But definitely not the other fairly standard dishes I ordered.
I had Thai milk tea, an order of shrimp summer rolls, and a pork banh mi. Something immediately seemed off with the Thai tea, usually one of my favorite treats. It barely had any of the usual Thai tea taste, but more important, the milk seemed to have turned or was about to go bad, so I told the server that the condensed milk was going bad. She told me that it was actually half and half, so I drank the rest of it, but it was pretty terrible. The shrimp summer rolls were ice cold... I'd have been fine if they were the usual tepid summer roll temperature, but they were for some reason icy and without much taste. I considered leaving them uneaten, but I was hungry, and poor, so I ate 3/4 of them. (But I will say that they were HUGE, if you value quantity over quality.) The same problem with the pork banh mi...not flavorful, kind of gristly. I have never had a bad banh mi anywhere else before this week. Again, I considered leaving the whole dish behind, but being poor, I decided I can't afford to waste food. I will try to steel myself to finish the sandwich tomorrow. Maybe it's better refrigerated.
Anyway, if you look at my other reviews, you'll see that I give nearly every restaurant a 4 or a 5. I'm the queen of grade inflation for restaurants. But not for Pho Kitch'n, unfortunately. read more