Pho 99 Fine Vietnamese Restaurant — Restaurant in Markham

This is a quaint little restaurant that is modelled after authentic Vietnamese restaurants, where the utensils and sauces are on the table off to the side. Definitely a family-owned, mom&pop shop based on appearances alone. It’s a really nice, clean and quiet place.

The food is fine. I actually really liked their house special pho and their fresh shrimp rolls. I thought the broth was good— could have been a bit stronger in flavour, sure, but good nonetheless. They provided a great amount of garnish on the side with your noodles, which I really enjoyed. It’s typical to receive beansprouts, lime, and basil on the side but they also offered chilli peppers and did not skimp out on the portions for any of the garnishes! Overall, it was a rather decent price. I got a small bowl of the house special pho for about $10 and I thought it was fairly portioned with a good variety of toppings.

Unfortunately, the service itself was a little lacklustre and definitely took away from the experience. This is the only reason why my review is 4 stars and not 5. At some point, I had ordered a soda sua hot ga (condensed milk & egg soda), had to remind the waitress that I ordered a drink, but then I received a soda with condensed milk and lime instead. No big deal though, I didn’t want to trouble the waitress any further. I will give the restaurant the benefit of the doubt here since they appeared understaffed and had a few delivery orders to handle.

Parking is plentiful, free, and the restaurant itself is wheelchair accessible.

All in all, I am glad I gave it a shot. I do encourage others to give this restaurant a try, and I hope that they don’t let the negative reviews or its appearance deter them from giving this...

I used to come here often before the pandemic. It saddens me that the food quality and service has gone down. There a couple feedback I want to bring to the owner's attention.

As I came into the restaurant, there a thick heavy fog- like smoke coming from the kitchen, there is poor ventilation in the kitchen and the smoke made its way to the restaurant. This not only affects take out customers like me but also compromise the health of the employees.

The server that attended to me gave me inaccurate time of when the food will be ready. She assured me that it will only take 15 mins. I end up waiting for 50 mins. I would not have mind if she said the true approximate time as I could have waited in my car since the air quality in the restaurant was terrible.

As for the food, the overall quality and taste was just not the same as before and there was a very strong msg taste. I was kind of disappointed with this...

After experiencing a reopening for dine-in at another pho place we usually go to where they started using plastic throw away bowls and tiny kid size spoons and wooden take out chopsticks.. Not to mention the cheap tiny premade hot & hoisin sauce we had enough and started visiting pho99 again.. Wow do I miss these big bowls... You know there's a science to Porcelain Pho bowls.. They are used to keep the broth and noodles hot till the very last bite. The big spoons and chopsticks are used so you can actually get a mouthful of both broth and noodles together. The meat portions on the order are also very good here where other places have seem to get worse over covid.. Tea still comes out in a teapot and your own cup 👏 I have definitely been coming back for the Pho.. 5 out of 5 stars for the experience that just for that time spent eating. Makes you forget about the time we live in and all this...