PHO DAY — Restaurant in Toronto

I came for the $100 VIP promo and confirmed with my server that I’d get the card if I spent over $100. She even checked with staff in the back and said yes. After I paid, the cashier told me the promo was over and I would not get the VIP card. Total bait and switch.

The food is mediocre and overpriced. You’re mostly paying for the late-night hours. They also tack on a 2.9% credit card fee.

Staff clearly aren’t trained well. Other reviews mention them ignoring peanut allergy warnings. That’s not just careless, it’s dangerous.

This is a real, unpaid review. If you want better food and service, head down the street to Madame Saigon or Linh Anh instead. Late night? Magic Noodle or Ajisen Ramen. You’ll thank yourself.

Feel free to read the owner's AI-scripted response and all the other incentivized reviews, and make your own call.

UPDATE: The owner's response to my review is honestly disappointing. Instead of acknowledging that their own staff confirmed I would receive the VIP card even after checking with the back, they doubled down and accused me of lying. That says a lot about how they handle honest customer feedback.

To be clear, I asked before ordering, and was told I’d get the promo. If your own team is giving out wrong information, that’s a communication and training issue not something you shift onto the customer.

They also claim the credit card fee is 2.4 percent, not 2.9. Either way, it was a surprise charge that wasn’t mentioned verbally, and the “signage” was just a sticky note easy to miss and pretty unprofessional. If a restaurant is going to nickel and dime people with fees, especially when you're ordering everything yourself through a QR code, I wouldn’t feel bad just taking that fee out of the tip.

As for allergy concerns, brushing it off with a generic statement doesn’t address the fact that others reviews have flagged serious issues. Ignoring that feedback doesn’t make it go away, it just makes you look worse.

Instead of taking accountability, the response was full of denial and deflection. That tells you everything you...

Food was not on par with other pho restaurants given the same price point. The rice for the broken rice pork chop dish was cold. Even though the photo shows two portions of pork chops they are sliced so thinly that it’s the same as one regular sized pork chop. The meat was dry, overly sweet and had hardly any lemongrass taste.

The rare beef for the special beef pho noodle was well done and the meat clumped together. The noodle was a wider type of rice noodle and was probably cooked in advance as the they stuck together and broke easily when I tried lifting it with my chopsticks. The soup colour was a murky brown which is not typical for a good clear beef broth.

Even though the place was clean and tidy the atmosphere was severely ruined by their wait staff. It wasn’t even busy with maybe just five tables. No one smiles or even says thank you when paying for the bill. The young male server with the glasses was the worst. When asked for the bill he didn’t say a word of acknowledgement and when asked again he rudely gestured at the cash register when he went behind the cash register; not one word came out of him. Did that mean he wanted me to pay there or that he was getting our bill ready? In the end he did neither. No one brought our bill to our table nor placed it next to the register. Will not visit here again as there are plenty of good quality pho places in the GTA with much better food and service. I should have known that this wasn’t a good place given how slow it was for a weekend...

Ordered 2 different phos, which came with a good amount of rare beef and proteins. The broth was a little salty but I was told by my mom that the broth didn’t taste like this the last time she went. Broth was lacking depth of flavour, either missing more fish sauce or salt.

The meal was decent, I wouldn’t say it was the worst pho I had but it did the job. The noodles were cooked properly and the amount of veggies that came on the side was a good amount.

At the end of my meal, as I was finishing the broth, I noticed a piece of clear plastic in floating in the broth. It appeared to be a piece of plastic from a side of a bowl or container. I notified our waiter and he escalated it to the manager. The manager took the piece of plastic and said he will let the owner know. The manager took things very seriously and he apologized for what had happened.

Too bad the owner who was there at the time, didn’t come over and speak with me. They offered me a discount of 20 percent. I’m not the type to make a big deal out of an accident but if i ingest the plastic, I could have been seriously harmed. It was pretty sharp and it was the size of a pea. An acknowledgment from the owner would have been better than the 20 percent discount.

A friend went to go try this restaurant and I was told there was something else very alarming that was found during the meal.

I don’t understand why the reviews are so high, I am leaving a review just to balance out all the...