Marion S.
Yelp
In the hustle and bustle of downtown Glendale lies another hidden gem...which is fitting because it's right across from the formerly known, Jewel City Bowl. You might never know it's there, it's a brick building...on a corner-ish...there's a very difficult parking lot to get into and it turns out you can't even park there. Once you find it, you will know where to get a great banh-mi and a bowl of pho.
Walking into Glendale Pho Co, you don't get hit with the aromas of pho and fish sauce. You wouldn't know what kind of food they serve. There's about ten wood tables and if you come at the right time (or the wrong time), you'll see a bunch of people slurping up bowls of pho. Take out or dine in? Sit where you want.
We ordered the beef pho (you can add up to three types of meat), chicken pho, pork bahn-mi, and shrimp/pork spring rolls. We also got a thai iced tea and an iced coffee. The latter was more coffee flavor than condensed milk which seems to be the norm. It wasn't sickening sweet...the coffee had a nice bitterness to it, you could taste the coffee, it was good.
Onto the food, the beef pho comes in regular and large sizes. I would opt for the regular unless you're really hungry. The pho doesn't come out so hot that you have to wait to eat it. Immediately I dipped the spoon in and stirred it around. On first taste, before I added all the accoutrements, the broth is simply comforting. Warm, flavorful...slightly sweet? It's not the salty, funky broth you're probably used to. I think I prefer the funkier broths versus the cleaner taste they offer, but there's no wrong answer here. The glass noodles are good, the meat is good, the portion size is so filling and worth it. Probably the best compliment I can give someone's pho, I didn't really need to add anything to it. Yeah, it's always great to give it a squeeze of lime and maybe a hit of hoisin or jalapeño, but I don't think I needed to do much to get it to my liking.
The spring rolls are what you'd expect. Rice paper, a nice salad in between, some thin slices of pork, and shrimp. The only thing that made this dish slightly disappointing was the peanut sauce...it was more like thin peanut butter and didn't really add much towards the flavor. If the sauce gave that punch of flavor, it'd really set this over the top, but unfortunately it's neither good or bad.
The best thing we had though was the bahn mi. The first thing you want from this sandwich is the right kind of bread. The outside is crusty, but not so that you destroy your mouth. It's chewy, squishy, and soft, but can support the sauces and fillings. We got the pork one and it's very sweet and savory. It's a lot of pork too so every bite is filled with flavor. With some banh mis, the veggies kind of overpower the ratios, but in this sandwich it's a lot of meat and bread and I don't really remember the other stuff. You get a half a baguettes worth of sandwich, so a full foot or so and it's only like 10 bucks? While I might want to come here on a cold night for the pho, the banh mi might win me over.