Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Pot-O-Pho, Winchester VA

One of the primary types of restaurant missing from Winchester is a decent Vietnamese place. You can't swing a dead cat in Northern Virginia without hitting at least a pho shop if not a full-fledged Vietnamese restaurant, but here, there is zip for Vietnamese cuisine, which ranks up at the top of my list of cuisines that I love. I was happy to learn about a month ago that somebody was giving it a go at a restaurant named Pot-O-Pho which we tried yesterday.

Phở Đặc Biệt

Gỏi Cuốn: Summer Rolls with Shrimp
The restaurant itself is a huge cavern, a recycled Chinese buffet, that is very deep, very hard, and very noisy. It's not a comfortable space. Service was lackadaisical to comical. The food was decent for the money. Having a lot of experience making pho broth, I would give the pho broth here a solid B, being both a little too cloudy and a touch overseasoned for my liking. I like to take my spices out of the broth sooner than whoever made this broth does. The bean sprouts served with the pho should have been thrown out the day before.

The atmosphere is tough to love and the servers really don't know what they are doing and have had no training, but the two dishes we tried were pretty much what they should be. Given the poor location of the restaurant, it's going to be a tough go for them. I wish them luck.

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