Pho Guildford — Restaurant in Guildford

We had a dinner reservation. I ordered a tofu curry, my husband ordered a beef curry and we wanted a simple papaya salad to share. The waiter said that the salad comes with topping, i.e. prawns, chicken or "this is no chicken" and we can't just have a plain salad with no protein on. Since I don't eat meat, we chose to have the "this is no chicken" option. When the food arrived, instead of tofu, I was served a chicken curry, I only realised when I bit into a piece of chicken. No big deal, I spat it out and called for assistance. Unfortunately my husband's curry was right, but lukewarm, so he asked that to be heated up too. And the salad came with nothing on it - this is after we were told that we "have to have" one of the toppings. We asked the waiter who took the order where is the vegan protein, i.e. the "this is no chicken" pieces and he genuinely kept saying that there is nothing on top of the salad as we did not want the chicken, so here it is - "there is no chicken"!! :)) Then the manager came and she replaced my chicken curry for a tofu one, re-heated my husband's dish and said there is an option to have just the salad (the menu was not clear about that, perhaps it needs adjusting) and indeed there is "this is no chicken" option they serve - I began to think that I imagined such product exists on the market after the interaction with the waiter! Anyway, the manager was fantastic - we all had a good laugh about it, she apologised and as a goodwill gesture she did not charge us for the salad or my curry, which was lovely once it came with the tofu and not the real chicken. The food is amazing - aromatic, rich and wonderful. Perhaps the staff (not the manager, she was great!) needs to have a better understanding of English and a lot more training on what's on the menu and how to take the correct order, so a vegetarian doesn't end up with a chicken dish. We will be returning to Pho as the food is fabulous and even so things went wrong, it was...

UPDATE - So they responded to an email and the manager wrote the following and I think it's fair to put in their comment "I just would like to clarify that, all our food is made fresh from scratch in our kitchen – and our chefs put lots of time and effort, especially when we made the stock. Our stocks are slowly cooked for over 8 hours, this is why sometime, when the deliveries are late, we are running out of stock, as we don’t have a central kitchen, or we don’t take any shortcut like stock cubes".

They also offered me a full refund via bank transfer so I have changed the service rating to 5 stars.

Really poor experience. Items missing off menu seemed odd - no chicken broth? Anyone can make this pretty easily in a couple of hours. Service ok-ish but it took 40mins for a bowl of noodles to arrive. Which, again, seems odd. Noodles literally take two mins to make. I had the beef brisket pho. The stock was very average, just salty without any of the easy to achieve flavours of even your worst pho in Vietnam. The beef had no flavour whatsoever - it was like eating dead flakey skin that had been soaked in water overnight - and the bean sprouts looked a bit dodgy so I didn't go near them. And, to top it off, have woke up this morning with diarrhea. You just got the feeling that the kitchen didn't care at all about the food. Badly run kitchen, with basic stuff missing and equally badly made food taking ages to arrive. But then it's a chain noodle place where no real cooking is done. Worst eating out experience in a while. I've given 1 star for service - but most of that is to down to the kitchen as they would be on minus 5. The table service wasn't too bad - probably a 3. In...

I'm giving this specific branch just 1 star for the service, with the hope that management will read my comment and rectify what I saw today. Just to say, I'm a great fan on Pho and love it's food. The food is always 5 star. So ... I visited Pho in Guildford tonight and the waiting time was quite long, the kitchen was very busy with take away orders which clearly upset all food delivery drivers with one waiting for over 20 mins at the door. The restaurant was not busy at all, about 5 tables inside and about 4 outside. I saw 3 different girls and a man on the floor serving customers and one would think that 9 tables in between 4 people is not that tough. I wasn't asked all those usual questions: what would you like for a drink, how is the food, would you like a desert, ... but never mind. What i noticed and upset me, is that none of the outside tables were wiped after a customer left and a new one was set down. I took pictures off all empty tables just to upload them onto here, they had food stains and little bits of food left from the previous customers. They wiped them only after realising I'm going around and taking pictures of dirty tables. They might say they wipe and sanitise them before offering to another customer, but nope. I saw how 2 dirty tables were offered to customers and all a waitress did just brought a menu sheet. That's very unhygienic to know that your fork might slip on a table where someone else fork was. Very upsetting as it's clearly a pattern and not a one off situation.

And on another note I got a bit dried off mint stem and a lime slice that was very hard to squeeze...