I really wanted to like An Choi but I just couldn't find much to like. The waitstaff was super nice and friendly and did try their best to accommodate us but in the end the bad food and the constant food mix-up put a bad taste in my mouth. The restaurant itself is very small and decorated with the raw industrial feel with exposed brick, pipes and filament only light bulbs. The actual kitchen is probably the size of my bathroom and literally only fit 2 cooks. That to me was a bit of a bad sign because there was just no room for them to cook in there. The menu has a lot of traditional Vietnamese dishes that sounded great on paper. They had spring and summer rolls, bun, bahn mi, pho and other great sounding dishes. We ordered a bunch of summer rolls for the table and an order of fried chicken lollipops. The apps came out quickly, so quickly that we didn't even get our drinks (that is another story). The rolls were fried with pork and shrimp and we also got an order of veggie rolls as well...they were fine, nothing really special. I tasted more of the fried skin than much of the filling. I actually liked the chicken lollipops better although I'm not sure if the rest of the table did. They were these small bite sized pieces of chicken on the bone that reminded me of Korean fried chicken. Then the rest of the meal kind of went downhill from there. We waited for our drinks and they never came, which I think it totally unacceptable when all you're ordering is Diet Coke and Lemonade. We ended up re-ordering our drinks with a different waitress and then our original waitress came out to apologize. Finally our drinks came and my vietnamese ice coffee was not very good. First of all, it didn't come in the drip press contraption. It was literally coffee on ice with a very small helping of condensed milk on the bottom. You could barely tell there was any milk and I had to keep stiring to even get any sweetness in the coffee.
Food wise, I had ordered the pho, bahn mi combo ($12) which I think is such a genius idea! It's the best of both worlds and I got the sandwich with pork belly and the beef pho. When it came out the owner made a comment how this was the best combination, so I was very excited. In most pho places that I go to, it's kind of a dumpy, dirty Asian restaurant, but the pho comes out in 5 minutes and tastes amazing. But here, the place is a bit "nicer" and it took forever for the pho to come out, which I think is weird b/c most places have been cooking the broth all day and all they do is put in the noodles and beef. But I was keeping an open mind. The pho came in a cute and appropriate size bowl but there just wasn't much flavor...something was missing that made it just a regular bowl of noodles in broth. Meanwhile, VA got a similar combo but she had ordered with meatballs, which were missing from her pho. I moved on to the bahn mi and again, it was missing something. There wasn't enough pickled radish/carrot mixture, cilantro and all the other flavorful stuff that makes the sandwich amazing. Although the bread was soft, there was not much else that I really liked. VA had ordered the original sandwich and yet again they had messed up her order. It was some other sandwich that looked similar to mine. The other girls at dinner got noodle bowls with pork and tofu and some kind of beef dish that they all said they liked. The total bill was $24/pp, which again is higher than what I would normally pay for way better Vietnamese food in Chinatown.
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