Pho Minh Havana is... fine.
And honestly, sometimes fine is exactly what you need!!!
The pho is decent, the broth is warm, the noodles are doing what noodles are supposed to do, and the overall experience is perfectly respectable. Nothing happened that made me reconsider my place in the universe, but nothing happened that made me question my decision to leave the house either.
The portions are solid. The flavors are there. The service was perfectly pleasant.
Would I write a novel about it?
No.
Would I eat here again?
Yeah, probably.
It's the kind of place where you finish your meal and think, "That was pretty good," and then you're back on your phone five minutes later.
But toward the end of the meal, I started thinking about Oliver's Italian.
I don't know why.
Maybe my brain was trying to establish a baseline for what "okay" actually means.
Because Pho Minh Havana is okay.
Oliver's Italian is where you start wondering whether "okay" was ever actually part of the conversation.
At Pho Minh Havana, I ate my meal and went about my day.
At Oliver's, I ate my meal and began conducting an internal audit.
At Pho Minh Havana, the table was clean.
That sentence alone puts it several rounds ahead of Oliver's.
The experience at Oliver's has the peculiar energy of eating dinner in a room where someone just moved a couch five minutes ago and nobody bothered to vacuum underneath it.
Pho Minh Havana doesn't even need to participate in this comparison. It simply watches from across the street while Oliver's allegedly acquires a bottle of wine from King Soopers, places it somewhere slightly darker for six hours, and then introduces it to the table like it has just returned from a vineyard in Tuscany.
"Tonight, we have something special."
Brother, that bottle has a yellow sale sticker on the back.
Anyway.
Pho Minh Havana: perfectly fine.
Oliver's Italian: a fascinating anthropological experience.
Pho Minh Havana gets three stars because I ate my food, enjoyed most of it, and left happy.
Oliver's gets 1 star because apparently Yelp won't let me give a restaurant 0 star for making me emotionally reconsider pasta? This is just an FYI for all restaurant goers.
Would return to Pho Minh Havana.
Would return to Oliver's too, but only if someone needs me to gather evidence. Then return to testify. read more