OHAYO VIỆT NAM RESTAURANT & KARAOKE ベトナム料理 京都店 — Restaurant in Kyoto

We had a bad meal here in summer 2023. It started off promising-- the vibe was nice and there were plenty of happy looking customers.

However, the menu was huge and only in Vietnamese and Japanese. We were using Google translate to read it, but the waitress jumped in and tried to help. Even though I speak some Japanese, she had a a mask on and spoke fast, so I couldn't really get much.

Many of the items looked like a single thing- fried pork strip, or dumplings, whatever- not full meals. So you'd have have to order a couple things to make a a meal. It was daunting, so we settled on pho as a presumably safe choice.

The pho was bad. The broth was bland, and the beef was a small portion and fatty. But not fatty in the good Japanese way. Fatty in the "pull bits of hard cartilage out of your mouth way." We didn't finish our meals.

Other things went wrong too that necessitated frequent calls to the waitress and/or made the meal less pleasant. There was a pitcher of what they said was water on the table that turned out to be watered down tea. When I asked for water we got a new pitcher, which was nice, except it was luke warm. The box of chopsticks didn't have enough in it, the spicy oil pot was empty, etc, etc... Oh, and there was no hosin or Sriracha to be seen. Maybe those are American additions to pho, but without some sort of spice or sauce, it was...

I have to admit that I got confused and thought it was an other Vietnamese restaurant in the area, with mechanical stairs, also near a hotel but with a lot of vegetarian options! So I was disappointed not to find them, not crepes, bahn mi or other vegetarians dishes I saw on internet in the other place 😅😁 The waitress was really sweet and always making sure we have enough water, she could speak English so she ask a waiter to come. He didn't understand much, he got confused and brought us 2 orders of fish (one pho and one other) when we decided only one but it was too complicated to explain. My mum liked the fish pho even if it was a little too spicy for her, but the fish fried was not her taste, she left it. I had fried tofu and vegetables, it was good. Nobody asked at the end if we liked or had a good experience and we had to pay cash and didn't know about that, so we were not...

I made the mistake of showing up to a restaurant that had open seats when everything else was packed. The food we had was very mediocre and of the 6 meals we ordered it took a half hour to recieve 3 of them, another 10 minutes for the 4th, the 5th came out another 10 minute after that and we never received the 6th meal. I had to ask several times in order to get a water pitcher that had immediately gone to other tables and they just grabbed one from one of the tables that no longer had anyone. The staff mostly ignored us for the other parties but were helpful and polite when we actually were able to interact. The end feeling we all had was disappointment and frustration. If you are a foreigner to Japan or Vietnam I would recommend choosing a...