The Paper Bridge (Bún Chả Cầu Giấy) — Restaurant in Portland

First of all, let me start with my personal feelings. As a Haiphong girl, i have been loving pho my whole life, I was so glad because, FINALLY a restaurant offers FRESH NOODLE in Portland. I moved to USA since 2013, except coming back to Vietnam, I could only eat pho with fresh noodle when my family visit California. I did not come in in the grand opening day because i know it will never be good experience/service due to high demand so I waited until tonight. I have read all negative and positive comments and agreed on some points.

PRO: friendly staffs, nice atmosphere, very unique, it brings alot of old good memories for me. I will have to repeat one more time, yes this is the ONLY and FIRST restaurant offers fresh noddle. Also, I like the way they are consistent with Northern food style. My husband is Vietnamese, but has grown up and lived whole life here and his family is Southern. He used to eat Pho with Hoisin sauce. They do NOT serve Hoisin sauce here. As you know, 90% people in USA eat pho with hoisin but they are very determined with original taste. If anyone has eaten Northern pho, you know it does not go with Hoisin sauce. Dont go wrong here, it is NOT wrong or right, its just the way you eat and you can eat whatever you want. It is just simply original Northern pho style :).

Now let talk about the broth taste. I read a comment said the broth is bland. When i tasted the first spoon of broth, my mind was like, okay, its not super good. It is not rich, moist enough…i feel like it is JUST THERE in the middle between good and average. However I just wanted to explain a bit about broth. There is a difference between classic pho (northern) and Southern pho. You will be disappointed if you are expecting the broth with strong herb fragrant, dark, fattier, sweet, bold like Southern style because northern pho will bring you just a light/clear yellow broth which is moist but light and gentle. I dont think the broth is bland but it has not satisfied my tongue quite yet. I will stop right there because i believe they are still new and just need a little more time to improove.

After the first spoon of broth, my tongue was compensated with the fresh noddle. The moment i bit and swallowed the noddle strings, i knew that I was HAPPY after 35 minutes waiting for only two bowls of pho. Yes, im a Fan of fresh noddle. I have read comments saying the noddle broke apart, I think the owner has read all feedbacks and improved on the noddle. The noddle strings are not broken today, fresh, silky, tender as I expected. However, i noticed one thing, the strings are not even, some small, some big. Lol. I know, im very picky. It may be they are hand made.

CON: WAIT TIME, we had to wait 30-40 minutes just for two bowls of pho, pho is not customized food, all ingredients are cooked, they just need to put together how could it take so long? PORTION are probably smaller than other restaurants, it was enough for me but my husband had to order extra noddle which costs $5 more and he said it was just almost enough for him, according to him, it is less meat than other restaurants lol, and PRICEY (my husband bowl is $29, which he has never asked for more noddle in other restaurants) but each pho bowl goes with a Vietnamese fritter so it is win win… PARKING, OMG it was so hard to find a parking spot.

I was full so we did not have chance to try other foods. I already knew how good is Haiphong banh mi cay because it was a part of my childhood, so I did not expect it will be as good as what I have tastes in 30 years :), but I would love to try next time. I will save my stomach for others like pho cuon and banh mi cay, cha ca La vong…

Overall, i would still give it 8.5/10. It has alot of potential and i will continue support them because they are the first and the only offers fresh noddle in Portland now.

Updated. I came back to try breadsticks. Pate very delicious, bread is a minus though, chewy instead of crispy, but overall, good snack. Pho Portion gets improved, more...

I've eaten in this restaurant twice. On the first visit, I was intrigued by the menu. Some of the dishes were pretty good, and the only weird hiccup involved a beverage. We ordered a cocktail from the "Blended" section which showed up on ice. I asked about it, and the server said, oh, the two drinks that are blended are these two, and pointed at the first two of seven blended drinks ... she offered to take it away and blend it, but due to timing considerations we declined.

This experience was still tasty and interesting enough to warrant a second visit. We made a reservation and returned last night with friends. The service was an embarrassment to the restaurant every step of the way. When we arrived, our friend already had a beer, as they beat us there by five minutes. Nobody approached to greet us or take a drink order for more than ten minutes. We had to ask to relocate, as our table, a reservation, was seated under a huge ceiling fan, in an intense wind tunnel. My friends wife said her eyes were watering it was so intense. My beer showed up after ten or so minutes, but my wifes cocktail order was lost, and we inquired with a runner about it after more than twenty minutes, since the staff was so scarce they were hard to flag down. We were seated right near the bar, so we could observe how flustered they were trying to figure out what happened to that ticket. The same runner returned with our drink. He was picking up a lot of slack, poor guy. The communication about food had the same vibe - no one appeared to look our way for ages, and when someone did come by, their manner was brusque and impatient. This is a large complicated menu which requires some thought and discussion. But the conversation was not conducted that way at all. The whole floor staff just seemed like they were in a hurry to ignore us and get out of there. After we ate some underwhelming food, featuring some overcooked rice noodles in a bland broth, and a few other items that were tasty, like the clams which were great, we paid our bill on a table overflowing with dirty dishes. The staff was clearing and wiping every other table without removing a single empty, dirty dish from ours.

There has been a lot of restaurant labor pool turnover here since covid, and it has never been more evident than on this visit. Lately after a good experience at a pdx restaurant, we always joke that we can't return because it will probably suck next time. That has never been more true than here.

I want to retain my optimism about restaurants, but it really sucks to spend fifty dollars per person on this kind of experience. It hurts other restaurants to fail this hard, since you've got us discussing on the way home how we can avoid wasting money like this for good, by improving our meal planning skills and never dining out. As former restaurant professionals and huge fans of the experience when it is done right, this kind of thing is honestly a bit depressing.

I'm tempted to wrap it up with some kind of vaguely agro sentiment like Get It Together Guys, but with the labor pool as I've experienced it on dozens of expensive occasions now throughout the region, I think it's a widespread social and cultural phenomenon, and it takes ingenious management and a super competitive budget to deliver a good experience consistently. Somebody at Paper Bridge wrote a cool menu which is highly intriguing to read, and some of the dishes come out tasty some of the time, but management here does not present guests with a well oiled hospitality machine - nowhere near.

I miss good...

Food: Small portion and overpriced. It was ok. Nothing spectacular or worthy of this kind if wait and cost. The chicken was very dry, small, and bony. It seems like it was intentional that they picked the skinniest chicken to fry. You mostly get bones and fried skin. Also it took an hour and a half for this dish to come out. The noodle dish was in a small bowl. It came with a side plate of garnish to add but the bowl itself is so small it was difficult to add anything to. Even the noodles were placed to the side (about 3 bite worth of noodles, which also cannot fit in the bowl). The egg coffee was good but you get it in a small mug thats only half full so maybe about 4-6oz of actual fluid. So you get a taste not necessarily a drink for $12. All around extremely disappointing. Service: wow. They dropped the ball on this one in every single way. It seem that there actually was no server assigned to any tables. They all became food runners? For perspective we were the 2nd table to be seated. It was pretty much an empty restaurant when we arrived.the restaurant quickly filled up. But No server to take our order. No one rounding. No one checking on us. They kept seating people and then taking orders from people seated after us. We waited and waited for our order to be taken and then waited some more for out order to come out. Took AN HOUR AND 35MIN for the order to come out. The food came out staggering (ABOUT 20MIN APART) so if you bring a date. You or your date might end up just watching each other eat. We had to ask the server multiple times about the other order. We were then lied to saying its out next. We continued to see other dishes coming out to other tables. One dish got brought to us from a kitchen staff and she ran back to the kitchen. We knew we didnt order this and just looked at it like wheres our food?Then someone else came to take it as it was delivered to the wrong table. So they just took it and brought it to the table that ordered it. But what if we had touched it?! They didnt even check or ask. In the meantime again. Where's the chicken we ordered?! We asked a different server about our missing dish. She said something but couldn't be heard. We ask her to repeat but she kept talking towards the back wall instead of to us. So the message was not received and then she ran off too. By now we have talked to three different "server" but none of them were assigned anywhere. What a mess. Also no one refilled drinks. So nurse your drink because no one is getting a refill. Atmosphere: the restaurant is cute. Small. Gets pretty loud. Restroom does require a code to use. Reservation is recommended. If you walk in, more than likely won't able to get in since they close at 2pm. Parking is limited as well, just street parking and we did note broken glass along the way. We will not be returning or recommending due to lack of customer service. Its one thing to have our food and to be able to converse and enjoy it, but to just sit there for that long of a time with no updates or check in really ruins the mood and appetite. Extremely disappointing. This place looks busy bc of the people waiting but of course people are waiting, the service is awful and...