Vinh M.
Yelp
Lots of potential, just needs work on both service and overall food quality.
This is a newly opened restaurant at Little Saigon in Chinatown that took the place of a Vietnamese vegan cuisine place, not too far from The Boat, Pho Bac Sup Shop and Pho So 1. There's parking in the parking lot right outside the restaurant but it's paid... unless you know to validate it inside the restaurant according to some Yelpers. Otherwise, street parking along S Jackson St works too if you wanna be walking distance from here.
Inside is a lot bigger than what you see outside: there's plenty of tables and booths that seat four or more. It'll get very noisy and a little stuffy inside especially when crowded like for this visit. Place does feel a little unsanitary with the tables and seats, and with the food too which I'll get to later. My friend and I came here on a Sunday evening around 5:30pm, and got seated fast though it did become a full house throughout our 1.5 hour visit. There are QR codes near the tables you can use to get the menu, and servers take your order after a little while.
I'll start off by saying the food quality varied here:
- My friend and I each got their bò né (sizzling beef, egg & pate), which came with wagyu beef (since they were out of regular beef), a fried egg, veggies (tomato, cucumber, romaine lettuce, julienned veggies) and a crispy baguette. There was a ton of sauce in mine and it almost covered every topping inside, while my friend's had much less sauce than mine. Quality of the meats could have been better too though it was very tender and the sauce marinated the meat well. I would prefer the bò né served at Xom in Cap Hill and Soufend in Beacon Hill for now.
- Things got better when we got their bột chiên (crispy rice cakes). These are fried rice cakes cooked with eggs along with some sprinkled green onions on top. Neither of us have ever really seen anything like this before in any Vietnamese restaurant in Seattle, so we had to get this and it was delicious! Eggs and green onions already pair very well, but it gets better when you get a rice cake that's fried, crispy and appropriately flavored too. Add their provided soy sauce and sriracha or Chin-su sauces for best results. This dish is enough to share among a group of four or less.
Things started getting rough when it came to service. Overall it was quite slow and we noticed a couple of things:
- The biggest problem was when my friend found two pieces of hair in his bò né skillet the first time. Servers remade his dish, which took less than 15 minutes but while other orders of the same dish were being brought out. This did negatively affect his experience, though, and he felt the beef was also overcooked.
- We had to flag down servers more than once to check whether our crispy rice cakes were coming, since we were actually both finished with our bò né already. Same went for asking for my friend's remade bò né. Good part is that the rice cakes came out piping hot.
- My friend noticed that there were one or two tables near us that seemed to be waiting for their food - for nearly the whole 1.5 hours that we stayed there. They came in after us too, and only had drinks at their table. We noticed them looking back and forth at the servers quickly bringing out food for other patrons.
- Servers overall seemed disorganized, bringing out mostly their bò né for tables and dishing out food quite slowly. People constantly kept coming in and filling tables since it was peak hours for dinnertime, so that didn't help too much either.
I actually really loved the food here and want to try some of their other things regardless of the sporadically iffy service. They're still in their soft opening for a little over a month (since August 8), so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and find another time to eat here again and retry their bò né, since that's what they're known for.