Huong Lan Vietnamese Restaurant — Restaurant in Nanaimo

If you have a peanut allergy, don’t waste your time here.

After being seated, I looked through the menu. Everything looked delicious. As per with any restaurant, I let the waitress know I have a peanut allergy with anaphylactic severity. The waitress then informed me they wouldn’t be able to serve me, as their kitchen has “peanuts everywhere”. I was surprised as I’ve been to many Vietnamese/pho restaurants throughout Canada that have all been happy to accommodate my allergy, as it is a common one. And don’t get me wrong here– I’m not expecting every cuisine to accommodate this request. I avoid Thai cuisines/restaurants where often every second menu item contains peanuts in some way. But usually pho restaurants are a pretty safe bet for non-peanut options. Sure, there are peanuts on-premises but that’s a calculated risk that comes with plenty of restaurants. That’s why I take my epi-pen if I eat out anywhere.

I brought up this fact and the waitress mentioned that they use the same deep fryer for everything. I asked if ‘everything’ meant the ingredients for the pho too, and she admitted that no part of the pho is deep fried, but there was still no way to assure me that it wouldn’t come into contact with peanuts and for that reason they refused to serve me. So the good news is I’m still alive to write this review. But in that moment I was thinking to myself “What, are they having food fights in the kitchen and peanuts are flying everywhere? Is someone just too stubborn to make sure they use a clean knife to cut the food?” I’m not going to accuse them of anything like that, but it’s not 1992 any more. There should be some kind of process in place.

Anyhow, we went to another pho place not far away and they were happy to accommodate. Maybe Huong Lan should figure out what the other places know that they don’t, so they can retain their customers with allergies. I know, boo-hoo poor peanut allergy boy. Life goes on. The one star in this review is for the waitress who was very polite...

I went to Huong Lan for dinner with friends and found the restaurant pleasant for the most part. However, there were some issues that bear looking into.

The first issue I faced was with the environment. I'm both autistic and ADHD, so environments with multiple competing noises, smells, and so forth, are already distressing to me. It was, therefore, doubly gruelling to sit one table away from an elderly couple who were playing loud music on a phone. I didn't say anything out of politeness; however, I believe that it's common courtesy for a server to remind people such as these that the space is a shared one—no one ever did. Don't get me wrong; I found all of the service staff very friendly, cheerful, and helpful. Nothing about our orders was amiss.

The food quite good, but, to my neurodivergent mind, the menu was quite confusing. I strongly suggest that you either have a photo for every item (as some restaurants do) or for no items at all; having visual representation only for certain things sometimes makes it impossible to visualize what an item might be. If memory serves, I had the vermicelli with grilled pork, which was delicious, albeit a tad pricey. I also had the lychee drink which, to my surprise, had real lychee balls in it—what a delight!

For these reasons, I liked Huong Lan (and I'd like to come back to try their phở). I think this is a lovely restaurant for a special...

There were 4 workers and only 1 of them was a good server that had good service. Food wasn’t good, only one server was respectful and the other ones were rude with no good attitude. I think this might because these people aren’t authentic vietnamese people so that they don’t have good attitude when working here. I think that you should hire more employees like the good server, she was doing all the work. One of the workers was standing here taking to a frequent customer i’m assuming and when you asked them something, she seemed very annoyed. Overall everything is a one star, wish I could give the good server 5 stars but maybe 2 of the servers who don’t know how to work at a Vietnamese restaurant should get a job at cactus club or something because they definitely shouldn’t be bringing their horrible attitude to this place especially the fact that they have a good rating. Also I think the menu should be changed because there is some interesting choices. It is also not authentic vietnamese food as it has other cuisines like curry and wonton soup. ALSO LOTS OF MSG! Anyways hope you guys can do better and I hope you guys take my feedback and make this a better restaurant so you guys can have more business since maybe those workers are scaring your customers away since it is not authentic Vietnamese...