Pho 1 Waltham — Restaurant in Waltham

I’m a Viet from Dorchester and I can tell you that this place sucks. Food is of low quality and I can tell that they are old and they used leftovers.

Here's the items that I ordered:

Large special pho. The bowl is consistent with the large size pho, but it was filled with soup and a little bit of noodles. The noodle portion was consistent of a small pho bowl. The meat was all crushed, separated and tasted old, indicating that it was leftover meat. What was so sad was the plate of vegetables that they gave me for my pho. They gave me only one basil stem consisting of about 4 tiny basil leaves and a few bean sprouts. The one tiny piece of lime was so old that only 2 drops of juice came from it.

Steamed dumplings: Flavorless and tasted like it was frozen, stuffed into a microwave, and then served to us.

Vermicelli noodles with grilled beef: The beef was so old that it tasted like it’s been sitting out for 2 days. It was so bad that I ate only half of my plate.

Avocado smoothie: I know how to make avocado smoothies and I can tell you that they used 1/10 of an avocado to make this smoothie. I can only taste milk, ice, and sugar. The boba was hard as a rock.

Vietnamese iced coffee: Coffee tasted nothing like Vietnamese coffee. The boba was hard as a rock.

Fried chicken wings: This was the only item that was good. The skin was crunchy and inside was soft. The flavor was very good.

The bill came out to $80 for 2 adults. This price would definitely be justified if the food was good. The food overall was so bad that I wouldn't eat here if it was free.

It should be noted that this is a Chinese owned restaurant representing Vietnamese cuisine. If you want authentic Vietnamese cuisine, go to one that is...

I really want to like this restaurant. I come here all the time, and it is consistently good. Its not amazing but its 4 minutes away from my house and Thai is my favorite type of food. However, they have gotten my order wrong a few times. Tonight I came to get takeout. I ordered vegetable curry, when I got home it had shrimp and chicken. I called and they said they would fix it if I came back. I came back, waited for them to fix it, (I called at 9:10 arrived at 9:40 and I still had to wait for almost ten minutes.) I got the difference refunded and got home, excited to finally eat almost an hour later. I opened it and found there was no tofu, despite tofu being in the name of my order and I specified I wanted the tofu one. I also found remnants of chicken in my order. Im pretty sure that they just took my original order, took out the chunks of meat, and handed it back to me. I was going to go back a second time, but at that point I was too hungry, and didn't care that much. This isn't the first time they've gotten my order wrong. Granted usually its good, the food is not the best but its consistently good/okay. I was disappointed, but Ill probably...

I travel for work and love trying pho wherever I go. Got the Dac Biet in a large size and the amount of meat I got was surprisingly good! I really love tripe and got a good amount of it so props for that. The other proteins were a great amount too, we'll balanced. Amount of veggies I would say is good, there were no jalapeños. The broth on its own is decent, but not overly powerful and spiced like I am used to, it seems to be missing some of that star anise type flavor to it and almost is borderline chicken broth so it didn't excite me too much. Other downside is that there is no chili oil, only hoisin and a Sriracha sauce which isn't the same. Also got the chao Tom which was really good, a fishy sponge like snack, though I was expecting it to be wrapped around sugar cane and it was not, there were 2 cane's just on the side which was a tad disappointing. Overall great amount of food itself, but broth wasn't too exciting and the app let me down a little (still really great...