Pho restaurant review

Wandering around Soho the other day, I was hankering after something South-East Asian, but everywhere we tried to get into - Koya, Tonkotsu to name a couple - were busy. I ended up in Pho, halfway down Wardour Street.

Pho, as the name suggests, mainly sells large bowls of Vietnamese noodle soup. It's a chain, apparently, and we'd stumbled into one of several branches it has around London.

Like everywhere else at 1pm in the west end, Pho was heaving with people, but we still ventured inside to see if we could find a seat.

Early signs weren't promising - the woman at the door greeted us with all the enthusiasm of someone who's discovered a nasty wart - but things picked up from there (not least because she disappeared to be replaced by a perky French geezer).

The menu has a smattering of vegan options (everything that's veggie is vegan too, I was told, although that presumably doesn't apply to the desserts including dairy ice cream) and we started with the veggie summer rolls, below.

To be clear, I've never been to Vietnam and don't have much experience of Vietnamese food or not, I don't know if these are in any way authentic or not but, while the rice noodles had the right amount of gelatinous feel and raw veg were suitably crunchy, it just felt like the whole thing was crying out for some protein - tofu, tempeh, what have you.

The peanut sauce that came with the rolls could have filled the gap if it had been thick and full of peanuts, but what came with it was not noticeably peanutty, and seemed to have more in common with HP sauce than Vietnamese peanut sauce.

Next up, I opted for a bowl of bun chay hue, below.

According to the menu, bun chay hue is a tofu and spicy soup with tofu and mushrooms. If it's not spicy enough, you get a few chillis on the side to amp up the warmth.

At this point the French waiter appeared and offered, of all things, a bib. Yep, a bib. Or rather, a sheet of plastic that looked a bit like a stray bit of bin bag. I must have looked askance at it. "It's not sexy, darling, but it is necessary," he said. Not if you've got a black top on, I thought, but slapped the bin bag on anyway.

The soup does what it says on the tin - a spicy broth with all the usual suspect (moah lemongrass MOAH) along with tofu and mushrooms. While I reiterate my lack of knowledge of Vietnamese food, I was rather disappointed to see that the mushrooms were the common or garden white kind, not some interesting Asian variety. 

I was also a bit disappointed to see that when the menu said 'soup with mushrooms and tofu', it wasn't kidding - there was no veg in the soup, bar the mushrooms. With an iceberg's worth of rice noodles in the bowl - you can't see the half of them when you begin - and a handful of tofu and shrooms floating on top,  bun chay hue was crying out for some extra veggies to break up the monotony.

'But what about the herbs and stuff I see on that side plate above?' you might ask. A fair point. But see the iceberg comment above - there was enough rice noodles in that bowl to take out the Titanic. A pinch of mint and slice of lime is a bit like taking a knife to a culinary gunfight.

While I laboured to make a dent in the noodles, my other half tackled another noodly mountain in the form of bun chay. As the name suggested, it was like my soup, only without the soup, and it suffered from the  same monotony - it's a veggie dish, people, stick some veggies in it!

Pho 

http://www.phocafe.co.uk/ 

163-165 Wardour Street

London

W1F 8WN

0207 434 3938