Green Leaf Vietnamese Bistro — Restaurant in Colwood

I’ve been a regular at Green Leaf and have always enjoyed their food, but my recent experience was incredibly disappointing.

I called the restaurant at 7:25 pm to see if I could place a dine-in order in advance, given that they close at 8 pm. I even explained that I eat quickly and could finish a bowl in just 5 minutes. However, the lady I spoke with refused.

It’s fine so I said ok I will do a takeaway. When I picked up the order, my Vietnamese coffee was missing, and there was no apology. She just said “oh”a .

I decided not to tip, and the lady responded with an attitude. To make matters worse, the soup was cold, making it impossible to cook the raw beef. We consumed the meal upstairs within 5 minutes of leaving the restaurant, so it's clear the soup was never hot enough from the start!!! We were moving so we live upstairs but we don’t have anything to heat it up at that point. Asked for utensils and of course nothing was in the bag too.

What made it even more frustrating was that they hadn't even closed by the time we finished eating and went downstairs.

As regular customers, this level of service was surprising and disappointing. We thought after we moved we will drive back to this restaurant but now it’s a NO in capital letters. We’ll be looking for another Vietnamese restaurant.

For the manager, please consider hiring staff with better attitudes if you expect tips. I hope you guys understand rejections plus missing item with zero apologies does not lead you...

In my opinion, this restaurant is great value for the money. It appears to be family-run, and the service varies depending on who's serving you, but the food is great, fresh, and hot. The bill is always less than I think it's going to be, given the amount of food I order when I go there with my daughter and grandchildren, and I always leave satisfied (and usually with a doggy bag, which is not for the doggy :-). As far as I know there is a Green Leaf Bistro downtown well, but the one that I go to is in Langford, on Goldstream Avenue. The only thing I can complain about, and this is pretty small, is that it has a lovely deck outside and a garden that someone once loved. If they were to clean the garden up, there would be more street appeal and I think it would be a pretty nice draw, especially in the nice weather when people want to sit outside. The building itself is very cool. It looks like it used to be a house. A few years back there was another restaurant in there, some kind of bistro that failed. The Green Leaf gang is doing well. They have managed to hang on in the midst of covid. They seem very careful with their masking, sterilizing and with seating people appropriate distances apart. They have a thriving takeout service. You know that a restaurant makes good food when covid-19 hadn't...

The whole experience was lacklustre if not altogether terrible. The wonton soup was lukewarm with very bland broth. The mango salad was poorly skinned mango that required careful examination and trimming of each piece to get rid of all the tough green skin.

The server was completely absent, and no one ever came to ask us anything or follow up after getting our order. We had to stand up to leave to get someone to come over and ask if we were finished.

At that point I mentioned the mango salad wasn't good, and the server had the gall to bring out a whole mango to demonstrate that we were 'wrong', and that we didn't know what mango skin looked like. Here's a lesson for this restaurant: The good part of mango is not green, and if there are green, tough bits on one end of every cut piece, THAT IS SKIN and should be trimmed. Would you serve the white part of a watermelon at a restaurant, knowing that it's not the tasty bit?

The server acted like they had won something by 'proving' this, completely ignoring the fact that she had two unhappy customers who know how mango is supposed to be served. We just let her have her power trip, and we will never come back.

Anyway, not a good experience, the other Green Leaf...