Pho Train

Toronto's downtown Chinatown has many, many Vietnamese cuisine restaurants. Among them is one of my favorites: Pho Train (or Pho Xe Lua). It's called Pho Train for the obvious reason of a train being their logo, and that many people don't know how to pronounce "Xe Lua".

The restaurant is located on the second floor on Spadina, just a bit south of Dundas. Just an FYI, the restaurant used to be located on the main floor downstairs, but it moved up about 4 years ago. It's improved for the better, customers walk up to burn calories before they consume a whole lot of calories. Brilliant!

The interior of the restaurant is built to seat as many customers as they can to make more money, hence lack of decor inside (which also means less cost for the owner). Pretty smart if you ask me.

This is their menu. A new menu actually. They only changed it from the old laminated ones a few weeks ago.

Part of their drink menu.

Their pho selection.

Self-filled order sheet. If you look closely and squint a little, you can see what my group ordered.

These bottles contain the best dipping sauce for the pieces of meat from pho. Seafood sauce and hot sauce (aka Srirachar rooster sauce). Not all Vietnamese restaurants have the same ones but Pho Train chose right.

This is what I ordered: Pho 101, aka the house special. I always order the house special because it usually has everything. Fresh raw/cooked beef, beef briskets, tendon, tripe, seasoned with a bit of green onions. The only thing that's missing are the beef balls, but it's still amazing.

A few things to caution the readers: The stock they use has a bit of MSG added for "flavoring", but it's not too much to ruin the taste. I think it's just right. Their noodles are a bit thicker/wider than most pho places, but I personally like it better this way.

This is the side platter of stuff to add into the pho for taste and texture: basal leaves, fresh bean sprouts, and lime slices.

A little lesson on how I normally eat pho for the lesser trained or the curious ones:

1) Push down the raw beef to cook

2) Squeeze in one slice of lime, add 5 basal leaves, and some bean sprouts. Stir the bowl to mix and make sure the raw beef gets cooked.

3) Prepare 2 spoons: one for dipping sauce and the other for soup

4) Dip meat, eat noodles, drink soup and repeat step 4 until finished

Ann ordered 103 which has rare beef and tripe.

This is an advocado milk shake that we got. I guess they ran out of glass cups and gave it to us for take out. Regardless, it was great. It tastes just the way I make it and I am a professional advocado milkshake maker since this was all I drank everyday for the past summer.

Overall, I'd say that Pho Train is simply superbly sublime and I'd recommend it to anyone any day for pho. Pho tastes great, the price is reasonable, and the portions are more than enough. It's hard to find a place that satisfies all three things that I look for in a restaurant. So if you aren't looking for good atmosphere or good service and just want to sit down with a nice and tasty, cheap hot bowl of pho, then Pho Train is your best bet!

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Here's my ranking for the pho places in Toronto Chinatown in case you are curious. This list is soley based on taste (note where Pho Train is on the list)

Pho Pasteur - best
Pho Hung (Spadina)
Pho Train
Pho Hung (Bloor)
An Dao
Pho Ai
Hanoi Bistro
Sai Gon Palace Restaurant
Ginger (Queen)
Pho 88 (Spadina) - worst