Pho Le Restaurant — Restaurant in Boston

To start, I am not Vietnamese. My wife, however, is Vietnamese, from Vietnam, and has only been in the country for a couple years, so her desires and taste for Vietnamese food is a bit harder to please.

We are from RI, and we drove up to Dorchester because she wanted to come to this restaurant. She has read countless things about how good the food is here, how wonderful, how authentic.... I could go on and on about how much good she has read about this place. I relented, and we drove up to eat here.

Luckily, we got a parking spot in their tiny, cramped parking lot. So we did not need to drive around for 30 minutes looking for a parking spot, which I thought was a good sign. In retrospect, should e realized it was a bad omen.

The place was jam packed, yet for some reason, there was s constant flow of people walking in to get food, and they always seemed to be able to get seated. Yet, when we arrived, they sat us at the booth right next to the entrance, on a cold day, when we had our infant with us, so we had to keep him bundled up and covered.

The place wasn’t the cleanest I’ve seen. It wasn’t disgusting. But it wasn’t immaculate either. Could’ve used s good scrubbing.

The waiter, even though my wife ordered in Vietnamese, spoke English to her. She couldn’t understand why, but whatever, maybe because she is married to me, a white guy.

The food took a while to come out. We saw people who came in after us, who ordered more complicated things, get their food before us. Maybe they were regulars, or friends of the owners. Who knows, but it doesn’t give s great impression to first time patrons.

We get our food, appetizer and main dishes, at the same time. Which is fine, nothing too wrong with that. But everything was just, warm. It wasn’t steaming hot, it wasn’t like it was just freshly cooked, it seemed as if it sat for a little while, like they were waiting for things to be finished. Or that they just forgot.

To me, my banh uot was meh. I’ve had much better, even in the bus stations in Vietnam.

She had a resounding meh about her bun mam as well. She said it wasn’t stinky enough, didn’t have enough mam flavor, and other complaints. But she tried to justify it to herself saying that maybe they didn’t make it stinky because of it being a restaurant that serves lots of food, as well as Americans who aren’t Vietnamese.

I said maybe it’s because the viet-Kieu that frequent the place, who were born here in the US, just don’t have the same taste for it as someone from Vietnam.

Either way, it was our first visit here, and probably ur last. The food didn’t wow us. It wasn’t worth...

quite disappointed with my experience here. don’t get me wrong, the staff were benevolent and the food was generally up to par, however all of this does not explain why we were SCAMMED in the end with an extra whopping charge.

we ordered the catfish dish which was listed as MP (market price) and asked the male server with glasses how much that would entail- he said $17. shocked by this price, we asked him FOUR more additional times after that, and every single time he affirmed the price for the catfish was $17. we even made sure to enunciate the “teen” in “seventeen” to quadruple check that he was stating the correct price, to which he would reply $17 every time.

in the end, we received a whopping bill of $70 for the catfish (4x the initial price the server stated). needless to say, we were extremely unhappy with this charge and he didn’t look up once while collecting our dishes. we chose not to cause a scene and paid the bill, only because we understood how much effort the kitchen staff probably put in to craft this dish. but, we will NEVER be coming back here again and would advise anyone reading this review to be warned about getting additional charges on their bill. if we knew this would happen, we would’ve just gone to pho hoa across the...

This restaurant is easy to see from the street. When you walk in, you're immediately greeted and seated quickly. There unfortunately is a slight smell when you walk in which I didn't like. It is well lit, so you can see if things are clean or not. It was a clean place to eat. A variety of people eat at this restaurant too, so you'll seemingly never be "out of place". The waitress was sweet and waited as my party of two figured out what we wanted to drink and eat. Our food came out oddly quick. It was like fast food quick which was nice, but interesting. My friend had been to another Vietnamese place close by and was comparing it with there. Here she liked the decor better and the lighting. She did feel however the other place seasoned the chicken more. She ordered the fried noodles. I ordered option 60 which was grilled meat and rice. The rice obviously was premade. In some spots it seemed slightly soggy like the moisture of the bowl it was in permeated it too much. The chicken was cooked well and tasty although it overall could have been warmer. It comes with iceberg lettuce and a tomato and carrot shreds. I skipped the lettuce and had the tomato and carrot. The carrot tasted a bit sweet which was off-putting The...