PHO TIME — Restaurant in Mill Creek

I want to share my recent and extremely disappointing experience with a to-go order I placed at your restaurant. I visited when the restaurant was completely empty and ordered four items: (2) Bò Kho, (2) Bánh Mì Chảo, and just some pho broth on the side. I expected a reasonable wait time, especially with no other customers. However, the experience that followed was unacceptable on multiple levels.

About 10 minutes in, I heard someone frying an egg—presumably for the Bánh Mì Chảo since I was the only customer there. A customer walks in and orders pho, he got it within 10 minutes. Despite that, the entire order took nearly an hour (57 minutes, to be exact) to complete. I cook Banh Mi Chao ever so-often myself and know it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to sear the steak—5 minutes tops. Serving cold or overcooked eggs is highly frowned upon with this dish because you’re meant to mix the eggs with the pâté and sauce and the eggs is usually last. I was already concerned about the quality at that point. Even my daughter, who was waiting with me, kept asking: “What’s taking so long, daddy?” and another customer arrives and orders a banh mi, gets it within 10min. and leaves.

At the 45-minute mark, I asked the waitress for an update, but communication was difficult. It felt like I was the one who didn’t speak English clearly, but eventually, after several minutes, she told me it would be another 5–10 minutes. When we finally received our order, what I saw left me shocked, irritable, angry, and sad. The guy that was eating the pho was done and was waiting for his bill.

Bò Kho:

This was *not beef stew. Instead of chunks of long-simmered beef, the cooks had taken rare pho meat (beef eye round) meant for pho, thrown it into broth, added a wedge of onion, a few mushrooms and carrot—and astonishingly—two fried eggs. I checked the second Bò Kho and it had the same thing: two fried eggs. Bò Kho is supposed to be a slow-cooked, hearty stew with tender chunks of beef. What I received was thin broth that tasted like instant pho seasoning mixed with sugar and it's not suppose to taste like pho. There was zero depth, and the dish was completely inedible. This isn’t just poor execution—it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the dish, and an assumption that Americans won’t know any better. That’s shameful.

Bánh Mì Chảo:

Came in a container filled with broth (which is all sorts of wrong), and what was supposed to be pâté was unrecognizable. It tasted like unseasoned ground pork. Again, they threw in thin raw slices of pho meat (beef eye round) and apparently placed the egg at the bottom of the dish—so not only was it cooked far too early, but it was then submerged and overcooked even further by the warm sauce and meat. There was no care, no attention to authenticity, and clearly no pride in what was being served.

I spent over $104 for this order, and none of it was edible. I’m someone who usually finds the silver lining and support small businesses, especially family-owned restaurants, but this was beyond disappointing—it was insulting. At best, this food was misleading. At worst, it was a terrible misrepresentation of Vietnamese cuisine.

This is not just a one-off kitchen mistake; this points to a complete lack of training, quality control, and culinary integrity—and ultimately, that responsibility falls on the owner. If the restaurant continues on this path, it’s hard to imagine it staying open for...

I think this is the first time I’ve ever written a review for food but feel compelled to do so after today.

I cannot speak to their meat dishes (maybe they’re great!) as we ordered only vegetarian but in complete honesty our $50 dinner order was the worst food I’ve ever had from a restaurant.

I mean truly - even the smell was a little alarming. I’ve never before received food from a restaurant that made me squeamishly wonder if we would be getting food poisoning with every bite.

I’ve also ALWAYS found a way to eat the food we order because eating out is a privilege and I feel strongly about wasting food - but after trying several bites of each dish I simply could not bring myself to eat anything further.

I feel bad saying this because staff seemed friendly and helpful - they even sweetly labeled each takeout box and called us after receiving our online order to ensure they got all the details right.

Here are the details:

Fresh tofu spring rolls :

Rice wrap 5/5 Noodles 4/5 just way too many “Vegetables” 1/5 why even pretend? Tofu 1/5 flavor strangely sweet or fruit-like(?)

perfectly wrapped but contained ONLY a single tiny piece of limp lettuce, a few bean sprouts, and an enormous amount of rice noodles. Almost completely flavorless! Sauce was okay though.

Tofu yakisoba: Noodles 5/5 normal/average Vegetables 5/5 no objections Tofu 1/5 flavor strangely sweet or fruit-like(?) Sauce / seasoning 0/5 genuinely inedible.

Small portions, unbelievably salty. Weirdly stinky in a seafood sort of way (?)

Tofu Banh Mi: Bread 5/5 Vegetables 4/5 also stinky and somewhat wilted but nothing drastic Tofu 1/5 see above Sauce/seasoning 0/1 very strange and flavorless massive amount of mayonnaise.

Bubble tea: 4/5 not the best but might order again! Tapioca seems fresh and...

Place is clean and good atmosphere. I like the decoration myself. I was born in Vietnam and have been in US for almost 14 years. And I would say this is the only restaurant around here gave me clean look feeling. I don't like dark and gloomy restaurant. The waitress Han is very friendly, made me feel like home. If you think about getting a Vietnamese coffee here, you should ask for the traditional Vietnamese version which is alot darker and chocolaty. My husband is American and have been in VN 8 times, he was just in love with it, reminded him about Vietnam. It is not like other Vietnamese coffee you get around here. If you just order a regular Vietnamese coffee, it is more like a modified American-Vietnamese version, less dark, but my girls love it this way. For the food, we love the butter calamari. The banh mi is very delicious. We ordered 2 banh mi: traditional and beef. I love the beef one. I don't like my banh mi too crispy so this is a win for me. My husband loves loves it too. Chicken katsu is yummy. My daughter and my great niece ate meat ball Pho. I would say it is good, just not something I would say Wow as I'm Vietnamese and we usually cook Pho at home the way we like so no judgement at all here. We will come back for sure and try other stuffs. Well, the price may be a little bit higher than other places (for some dishes, not all). But if you ask me if I want to get coffee from Starbucks, sandwich from Subway or here, definitely my answer is...