Jason A.
Yelp
Saw their Grand Opening sign and was craving some Vietnamese food. This is across the street from the Kensington Pho Ga Thanh Thanh.
Food:
I ordered the egg rolls (cha gio) and pork chop with broken rice plate. You get the option for cold/hot tea or water when they seat you.
The egg rolls were well wrapped, fried extremely crispy without any burnt taste, and their fish sauce was as good as any place around.
The pork chop was flavorful, juicy, and tender enough to tear apart without a knife. If you go to Vietnamese restaurants you know that places make their pork chop differently. This place's pork chops have a more natural soy marinated dark brown color, which is my preference, versus the more light brown/orange kind other places have.
Service:
This place seems to be new and family owned, so the servers at least on this Sunday were younger and less experienced, but polite and were clearly trying their best to accommodate me. Definitely not an issue overall and I expect this to improve over time. It was just kind of weird when they dropped the check and stood there waiting for tip and signature. Usually servers leave the checkbook on the table so you don't feel rushed out the door.
Look:
Very clean inside and you can tell they want to have a more elevated experience than your typical pho spot - the logo and menus are well designed on good material and each table has elegant seat covers and utensil boxes.
Location:
This place is under the bridge on Kensington so expect the usual street parking and random hood stuff going on outside, but mind your business and you should be fine.
I will say they are doing themselves a disservice by only naming it "Lua" on Yelp. Might be hard to find. On Google it shows up as "Lua Vietnamese".
This is the closest Vietnamese spot near me so I'll probably come back and try the actual pho when it's not so hot out.
Not enough negatives to take away a star, so I'll give it 5 stars for a good-to-decent local pho spot that's worth coming back to. I'd like to see them succeed and stay a while. Congrats on the grand opening.