Pho HouZ Vietnamese Kitchen — Restaurant in Calgary

Stopped in an hour and a half before they closed to grab dinner and was sadly left feeling disappointed. I didn't have high expectations to begin with, but everything I ordered (with the exception of the fresh lime juice, which is hard to mess up) didn't taste close to your regular authentic Vietnamese food. This place is also pricier than average for, in my experience, lower quality food.

The restaurant is dimly lit but quiet and comfortable and the staff are friendly enough. The food was quick to come out, but unfortunately that's about where the positives end. The meat spring rolls were crazy expensive ($9+ for just four) and were quite hard and overcooked. The seasoning was fairly strong, and definitely leaned a little more to the sweet side than your regular fried spring rolls.

The chicken pho came out in an extremely dark soup that again was overseasoned and didn't have the clean taste of typical clear chicken broth. The chicken was just large boiled slabs of meat that had no taste at all. The server kept trying to sell me on the grilled chicken pho because it "had more taste", so maybe that explains it, but chicken pho is still a fairly standard menu item and I expected much better. About half an hour to closing time, they started blasting really loud music that I could hear through noise-cancelling earphones, despite the fact that there were still diners around (their prerogative I guess, since it's almost closing time).

Overall, their late hours are good if you are seriously craving Vietnamese food and you just want something Vietnamese-adjacent. It's probably a decent introduction for someone who has never had Vietnamese food, but once you've had the good stuff, you just...

Pho Houz is one of my favouite SE Asian restaurants in the city. Very notable is they have the best chili oil for sale in Calgary and I am including Chinese and SE Asian vendors.

Pho Houz gets noodle dishes down pat. Never too firm and never too mushy and the protein selections are equally well prepared. When ordered as pho, the broth is not over salty, where so many Vietnamese restaurants fail, and flavour is robust and not thin.

I am a lover of quail and this restaurants serves it very tender, another bone of contention with other establishments where it is dried out. However, they come up a tad short because it lacks the crispy skin because of the sauce they smother it in. Nonetheless, the flavour of the quail is perfect.

Satisfaction is their strong point. If you do not like what is serve they have a no hassle get it right policy. This is rare in many restaurants.

Service is attentive and fast, on most occasions but I find the atmosphere is too sterile. Regardless, I come for the food and there it is worth a...

The food in this place is great but I had a funny experience at this place; first bite of my meal and “booom” got some hot sauce in my eyeball, the pain was horrible, so I asked the lady behind the counter for some help, if I could use the eyewash station from the kitchen (I believe most kitchen have one) so they didn’t have one, I asked her if she could call someone to come and take a look at my eye (at this point the pain got more intense) I am rinsing my eye with water for awhile and they lady just didn’t care, so she came and tell me I have to pay if she calls EMS or someone. Whatever, she knew what was going on and didn’t make the effort to help, her attitude wasn’t great, I even ask her for some milk (it neutralizes the capsaicin) and she just look at me like if I am dumb. So I am pretty disappointed about the restaurant for the lack of help, like it or not helping is part of customer service. I did managed to go across the street where I found some...