Pho Xe Lua

My roommate and I are regulars at Nha Hang Viet Nam down the street, but it was closed the last time we went. So we came here. The service was really nice and prompt, and the phở ga had a TON of meat in it, which was also nice. However, it was cinnamon-​flavored and decidedly bland. Compared to the big, meaty, hearty flavor we get at Nha Hang, it was lacking. BUT — just because it wasn’t to our taste doesn’t mean it won’t be to yours. So go check it out.

Phở was amazing! My uncle recommended this place. They give you a lot of meat compare to other places and the broth is ways delicious! The broth is everything!

The broth for the phở should be listed as a National Treasure. It’s Divine, and I’m sure it cures multiple illnesses.

i’ve been going here for a while; but recently made a review:
phở was amazing, i got the phở baby (don’t worry, it’s NOT what it sounds like!)
smoothies are great, too!
great music ambiance!

We came here tonight without really knowing much about this restaurant. We were pleasantly surprised. We were glad there was a waiter here that knew how to speak both English and Vietnamese. He really helped us out on what to order. We ordered the spring rolls, a pork belly sandwich, papaya salad, and two bowls of beef phở. Unfortunately they ran out of papaya salad but they were nice enough to offer us a substitution of papaya with a different type of vegetable. We opted to just cancel our order of the papaya salad though. The phở came with a good amount of slices of beef and the broth was very good. Service was also very good. The place seemed very clean as well. We will be back!

I’m a bit torn on this place, because they do have good phở. But ordering from — no exaggeration here — a mumbling ten year-​old boy in flip-​flops is just bad.

The food: ⁴⁄₅. My expectations were pretty low after the mediocre food I had at Tank Noodle. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I got phở with beef flank, egg rolls and fresh spring rolls and paid $ 12 in total. Phở was definitely better than at any Vietnamese chain you’d find outside of Argyle, and it much better than Tank’s tasteless broth. Egg rolls weren’t greasy and fresh rolls were nice and light, although they didn’t have any mint in them and the meat was a little fatty.
The service: ³⁄₅. The place smelled a little funny when we walked in and a few rows of tables at the back had all kinds of stuff piled on them. This is not a Michelin starred restaurant, so the ambiance (or lack thereof) is exactly what you’d expect from an authentic Vietnamese diner. Our orders were taken by a kid, who looked about 10, but it seems he was the only one speaking English there. The wait staff was pretty fast and friendly looking, otherwise.
Overall: ⁴⁄₅. A solid option to get phở at Argyle.

Great customer service and clean restaurants. I got the com tam bi with pork chop and banh bot chien. The rice plate was decent, but the not chien was disappointing. The broth that came with the rice plate was very bland.

Best Phở in the city. Great little family run business, always feel welcomed.

Good Phở and enormous portion! Will be back if I am back in IL

Excellent service and delicious food. It’s open a bit later than other places on Argyle, which is a bonus. The vermicelli bowls and phos are incredible. Highly recommended.

IMO, this is the best overall Vietnamese restaurant to be found in Chicago. Price, service, authenticity and taste! We’ve had various dishes at this restaurant over the years and the quality in the past couple years has been consistently better than most Vietnamese restaurants found Chicago.
Another hidden gem, they make really really good Vietnamese sandwiches here (the one loaded with pork belly). IMO, the sandwich here is better than Ba Le and Nhu Lan. Whenever I don’t have time for a dine in experience, the sandwich to go is my alternate option. I do have a few other Vietnamese restaurants close to where I live, but I still make the drive to uptown for the food at this place.
The Canh Bun (seafood udon noodle soup) is really good, this item is not on the menu book, it’s one of those new/​special dish that they post on one of their walls. This dish is very similar to another well known traditional Vietnamese seafood dish called Bun Rieu (cab noodle soup with vermicelli). The Canh Bun is a lighter/​less rich version of the Bun Rieu.

They lost 3 stars because:
1) I ordered a peach bubble tea & while it was okay, it didn’t taste like peach.
2) as another Unilocaler pointed out, the back tables are cluttered with all kind of crap.
3) There is a kid working there. It was kind of weird having a child take my order & him being the only one who spoke English.

definitely the best Phở in town. The Phở special comes with a lot of meat, and fresh basil, lime and bean sprout! So authentic and the portion is biiiig

Came here today with a few friends for some beef rice vermicelli. The food was great and I would definitely come back for phở and the vermicelli again but the service brings this 4 – 5 star review down to a 3.
The guy that waited on us took 10 mi s to bring tea. My friends coffee took closer to 20 mins. Each time he came back he failed to bring the water I had asked for 3 times. Finally a woman that served our meals brought us our chopsticks so we could eat as well as some waters. I don’t expect great service, but this was pretty poor.
I hope when I return service will be better.

Interesting place. I came in for a bubble tea before a concert down the street. The bubble tea itself was really delicious and made fresh. The experience was just meh for me though. It was late afternoon and the place seemed extremely overrun with clutter. I don’t know if there’s a story behind it but as someone unfamiliar with the location, I couldn’t help but wonder if the kitchen was as cluttered.

In the twenty years that I have been to Argyle for noodles, I have never stepped inside this place. I decided it was time to try a new place. The fact that my usual spot, Double Happiness, was closed due to a vacation, probably helped too. I came here with two friends who have also never been here, and we decided to all order different types of noodles so we can get a sample of what they had to offer.
Since I was already in the mood for egg noodles, I ordered the Mi Trieu Chau (shrimp, pork, chicken, wonton and quail egg in egg noodle soup). My friends ordered the Mi Bo Sate (egg noodles in a lemongrass beef curry soup) and the «Special» phở (beef eye round, flank, brisket, soft tendon, beef balls and tripe). I was not impressed with my noodles. I prefer my egg noodles to be more firm. It’s difficult to describe, but I am picky with my egg noodles. The soup was ok, I had to add my own condiments to flavor it to my liking. I also tried my friend’s phở. It was good. Not the best, not the worst. Her portion was very generous compared to mine, although neither of us specified a size. I have never seen Mi Bo Sate on any menus in all my years of Vietnamese noodle eating, but it was delicious. Probably my most favorite. I would come back for this alone. I would definitely recommend it if you like a curry based broth.
The service was typical Argyle service, if you know what I mean. The server was an older man who was very nice but had limited English. We weren’t able to really ask questions, and had to point on the menu to tell him what we wanted. He did often refill our water without us asking. The restaurant was bright and clean. I did not go to the bathroom so cannot comment on that. Typical street parking on Argyle Street.

The phở was nowhere close to comparable to the phở I had in California. The phở was edible, but so are the other phở options in the area so that’s not saying much. I thought that they gave me too much broth and not enough meat, which is a little strange considering that I had ordered the dac biet /​special (the one with EVERYTHING). But perhaps I made the mistake of coming here after a visit to California, so ok, I thought I’d give them another try before I write my review.
I came back here recently with the boyfriend. After a full day of eating through the city, we weren’t very hungry so we had opted to get a salad and soup.
We ordered the papaya salad and my favorite canh chua ca soup. The papaya salad was passable. I was a little upset that it came without the shrimp chips on the side, and the salad was also a little too soggy for me. It had an adequate amount of half shrimps, but not enough pork slices. Or, perhaps I gave most of the pork slices to my boyfriend. Who knows. All I know was I thought that Tank Noodle does a better version of this, shrimp chips/​crackers and everything.
The canh chua ca soup was very bland, in my opinion. It wasn’t nearly as flavorful as Café Hoang’s, but I think Café Hoang does the Thai version of this soup with added lemongrass. The soup should still taste fine without lemongrass, but it didn’t. The tomatoes weren’t fresh. I bit into one that tasted awful. I think they also made this soup in a hurry and so it lacked flavor. A lot of it. I certainly felt like an ingredient or two were missing.
We were going to order some food to-​go, but after a disappointing meal here, we decided we had better order our to-​go food from somewhere else.

I’ve always thought of Phở as a dish that is difficult to mess up and equally difficult to make phenomenal. I feel the same way about reuben sandwiches (which is why I always order them at greasy diners that I don’t trust). You can always count on Phở to be pretty good, which makes it a safe item to order off of any Vietnamese menu regardless of the appearance or reputation of the restaurant.
Phở Xe Lua proved me wrong. It is possible to make Phở that exceeds expectations and truly excites the taste buds. For starters, the Phở section of the menu is vast, so you have a lot of control over what exactly you are getting. The broth base is flavorful but not too fishy or salty. In my experience they have always been very generous with herbs and bean sprouts, which is great because I want a heavy dose of Thai basil. I have always found the meat to be the perfect rareness… not too chewy but also not raw. The bowls are very generous, so there is really no need to order any appetizers or sides.
And to top it all off, the staff is wonderful. My first time in, they forgot to give me my boba thai tea. The next time I came in, the woman taking my order remembered me without my saying anything and offered me a free drink. That to me is incredible, and exceptional customer service.
There are a million and a half restaurants to get Phở at in this neighborhood. Choose this one. You won’t regret it.

Well, well, well. An edible bowl of phở in Chicago. Not bad. I didn’t have to have the awful imagery of putting a lighter up to my money and watching it burn! I stopped by on a tuesday for lunch. I was in the mood for my people’s food so thought I’d be spontaneous and pick a random place I haven’t tried yet– also because some of the others were closed on tuesdays.
I picked this place. Not even looking at Unilocal because other’s opinions on vietnamese food on Unilocal usually aren’t very helpful. It was empty except for another table with a vietnamese family. I knew they were viet because I could understand everything they were saying– just cuz they’re asian and in a viet restaurant doesn’t mean they’re automatically viet. Also just cuz they were vietnamese it didn’t mean shit to me whether the food is tasty. It’s not an indication that the food here must be good. Please. I learned that lesson long ago.
I had the phở #2. which is everything but the meatballs. I was never big on vietnamese beef meatballs so thought I’d not include it. One thing that irked me a little was that my round beef slices came out pretty much fully cooked with a little bit of pink left. A tiny bit. I’ll have to tell them next time to serve that on the side cuz I hate mine already well done when it comes out. I like it barely cooked… slowly turning cooked in my broth-​to nearly raw. I ain’t no white girl, nor some white washed pussy asian, I’m not reporting you to the public health department. I appreciate that the broth was that hot to cook it that fast but c’mon, at least ladle the broth around the raw beef. I’ll forgive them this time on that. Next time, on the side! to make sure it doesn’t come out well done.
Anyway, the broth was almost decent, not as fragrant as I would like. I didn’t detect any star anise in it, and if there is then they need to use more and toast them. I enjoyed that I didn’t have to add fish sauce to it. Just my usual hoison sauce, lime and lots of jalapenos. The meat selection was pretty good and the tendons were nice and soft. I just wished there was more but for 6.55– it’s good enough. The noodles were also done right with just enough pull and bounce– praise the Lord they weren’t gummy and mushy. There’s nothing worse than overcooked rice noodles. Actually there is– broth that tastes like hot lightly salted water and calling it phở. the shame –Should pray to your ancestors alter on learning how to cook edible food.