First, the general decor and ambiance of the place is much cleaner than your usual Vietnamese place. It's got out about 5-6 small tables, 1 communal table and you can also eat at the bar. What I liked about the menu is that they had a simple 1-page menu of bahn mi and pho and then a few other appetizers. Sometimes it can be super overwhelming when you go to an Asian restaurant that has pages and pages of food. Virginia and I both thought about getting a pho and sandwich but after seeing other people get the sandwich, I decided it was better to split a sandwich. We got the classic bahn mi ($5) and spring rolls ($6) to split and each got the classic beef pho ($8) while Aarti got the papaya salad ($6) and cold sesame noodles ($6). Now Aarti also loves a good veggie bahn mi but apparently she had come here before and had a horrible veggie sandwich experience, so that kind of put me on edge for our food. The spring rolls came out piping hot and they were good but frankly it's pretty hard to get fried spring rolls wrong. I didn't try Aartis' papaya salad and cold noodles but she said that they were much better than her first sandwich experience. The noodles were the slippery glass noodles kind and came with shredded carrot and cucumber and looked pretty refreshing. The pho came out and I liked the fact that the beef came out totally raw because that's the way I like my meat in a pho. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't enough noodle but in hindsight it was probably the right amount of noodle, I was just super hungry. The broth was pretty decent, but probably could have used a bit more cinnamon/cilantro flavor. It was a bit too clear but it wasn't overly greasy which some phos in Chinatown can be. VA and I both put in a healthy amount of hoisin sauce, so that kind of made me think the broth was lacking something, but then again I always put hoisin sauce in my pho no matter where, so who knows what the hell it really means! Another way I judge if the pho is good or not is if my clothes and hair smell like pho when I come home (I know, it's actually kind of gross when you sit and think about it). But if it does, it means the flavors and smells of the broth was so strong that it just permeates you. So it didn't surprise me that I only had a small hint of eau de pho when I came home given the clearness of the broth. I did enjoy that there was a lot of beef in my pho. Generally, a lot of places will go overboard on the noodles but then scrimp on the beef. The scales were tipped in the other direction here, which you can't really complain about.
What you can complain about is the bahn mi. While I've definitely had worse, it wasn't all that impressive here. The bread was nice and soft but there just didn't seem to be a whole lot of meat in there. There was 1-2 thinly sliced pieces of ham but then a whole lot of carrot and daikon. I'm not even sure I tasted any pate which is a major bummer. VA also wasn't hugely impressed either so it was a good thing we just split one.
The one small service issue that bothered me was that they kept coming around trying to take our plates even though we weren't necessarily finished. It's not like there was a line out people waiting for our table. But they were generally really nice there and when they put an extra Fiji water charge on our bill, they were really apologetic about removing it from our bill. Note that this place is cash only, which is also another one of my huge pet peeves. But given that the total bill for 3 people was $41 (without tip), I can't really complain too much about that.
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