Cafe Mama Pho

Nice small restaurant where to have a good Pho.

I had a Pho with rare and well done beef in its small size. It is nice that you can either order small or large sizes. The small one was enough but if you want to fully satisfy a craving for Pho you may go for the large one. Broth is very good and the ratio of noodles and meat is right.

It's certainly one of the better viet joints around London. Food was good and portion was appropriate. If you worry you can always order the large which in my opinion certainly feed 2 adults (not exacerbating).

It is a decent size joint but you probably will need to queue in peek hours. Speaking of location, there are street parking around the area so do feel free to drive.

It was quite expensive though however. Fact that my coffee of £3 was less than half a glass was ridiculous. The pork in the banh mi we got was also quite fat. All in all, I expected slightly more for the price I'm paying, I mean it wasn't expensive but certainly wasn't cheap. So all in all while I loved the food the price pushes it down to just 3 stars (the half glass coffee really annoyed me).

You will smell like viet food afterwards tho so don't wear your prettiest clothes!

Minor complaint: in my visit, one of the staffs just came back from delivery, and despite there's a whole street of parking, he crammed his car to a tiny spot right in front of my car. Not only was it inconsiderate, it was extremely annoying as now I need to do a 10 point turn before I can get out of the spot. He wasn't even in a legal parking spot anyway! That alone really pissed me off, but what can you do, they do decent viet food and for London that's a hard thing to find!

This place is authentic! It's run by actual Vietnamese people so you know you're getting the right taste of everything! Would definitely recommend the pho or grilled pork w/ rice noodles!

Hands down my favorite pho spot in London- the broth was perfect, not overly sweet/dosed in MSG like most places and best beef I've had at a pho place. To be honest, pho is never my go-to out of all the Asian noodle soup options (I usually almost always pick ramen instead) because the broth is too sweet most of the time for me and the beef is just too tough. However, I think this place has it near perfect. I ordered the pho tai chin and while the raw beef (which cooks just slightly in the broth) is very tender, the well-done beef flank just melts-in-your-mouth. I will definitely come back again for the pho chin in the near future. While the pho noodles were soft with the perfect amount of bite, some of the noodles were unfortunately clumped together, resulting in a hard mouthful. I did go at the end of the day, so hopefully that was why. If you need condiments (Sriracha/hoisin sauce), you have to ask for it, which can be a challenge with how busy the restaurant is. Also, it's one shared bottle of each for the entire restaurant...which isn't the most sanitary of things in covid times. We had asked for sriracha and the waiter handed us a bottle, which he took away ~15minutes later when another table asked for it. An easy fix would be to just pour out the sriracha into small saucers for tables that ask for it. Surprisingly, even though I went just before closing at 9PM, the restaurant was still packed! I had to wait about 15-20 minutes before I was seated and there was a queue of delivery drivers outside. It would be a safe bet to say that usually a reservation is likely needed given how busy the restaurant is even at an off-peak hour. Definitely recommend this place, for sure the best pho restaurant I've been to in London and much better than Cafe East. I look forward to ordering chicken wings (They had stopped taking orders for most appetizers by the time I arrived :() and hopefully non-clumpy noodles next time!

Tasty food and less busy than cafe east!

Everything was tasty, although they forgot the pork skin that went with my noodles, but that's probably a good thing to cut down on the calories and fat!

Banh cuon was my fav for of the night. :)

Taste good! Serving speed good:)
Dishes variation but more than café east but the price roughly the same expensive...
Staffs friendly, small peace

I've been craving pho as the weather gets colder and my friend took me to his go-to spot for dinner, which is Cafe Mama Pho (formerly Cafe East by the same owner). There was a bit of a wait when we arrived but it's worth it.

To start, we shared a banh cuon, which are steamed Vietnamese spring rolls wrapped in rice noodle sheets with a minced pork filling. This is a must for us every time we have Vietnamese food. Compared to the ones at Cafe East, the banh cuon here have less filling but they taste mostly the same.

For our mains, we both got noodle soups. Most of their main dishes come in two sizes - medium and large. I got a medium pho tai chin, which comes with rare and cooked beef. My friend got a medium bun bo hue, which comes with a spicy broth and round vermicelli. I liked both broths - they were delicious and comforting. What I liked most was that my pho came with different cuts of meat, which usually costs extra to order at other Vietnamese restaurants. The portions were big even for the medium! I was stuffed after this.

This is a fantastic place for authentic, affordable and delicious pho. I recommend checking this one out if you're in the area. I know I'm definitely coming back for my next pho fix.

Well, what can I say, it is still as busy as Cafe East, but I feel the food is not as good.

It has taken over the space Cafe East used to be before it moved. Mama Pho has refurbished it and it looks very rustic, wooden tables and benches by one wall and stools, which seems to open up the space which was quite tiny when Cafe East was there, so it feels less cramped, and there is even room for a ledge and stools by the window to eat there.

I have still to come across any Vietnamese restaurant that does the summer rolls as good or even better than Cafe East, and oh, the peanut sauce and a spot of chili sauce, for dipping is to die for! Nowhere else seems to do this particular sauce. At Mama Pho the summer roll came with hoisin sauce for dipping, just not the same. Also the summer roll lacked the freshness or tastiness, as there is no vermicelli or mint in the rolls.

The raw beef pho was good, but slices are thick and not so tender, and the soup was sweet but just not steaming enough. The flash fried well done beef with lemongrass, with vermicelli noodle and salad also tastes good, but the vermicelli was not dry enough, and the beef was not tender enough or well fried.

The service was a bit slow. Took a bit of time to take our orders. We had to ask twice. We were eating quite late, around 8.30pm but there were a constant stream of people, and the two waitresses seemed a bit stretched.

Authentic pho, better to eat in house than take away, broth was rich, just downside was not having hoisin sauce

Thanks to Irene L for organising an outing to deepest ,darkest Deptford on a bitterly cold Friday evening for surprisingly good Vietnamese food. After the 10 minute walk from Surrey Quays station (London Overground), our little band of hungrydiners were relieved to see Mama Pho's bright restaurant lights on the corner

The first thing which hit me was the trail of wonderful aromas when the door opened. Familiar scents of south east Asian cooking started the gastric juices flowing.

We were lucky to have Sophie, one of the restaurant's owners, come and explain the menu to us. She confirmed that the dishes are from old family recipes. Home cooking is truly the source of some of the best food in the Far East, so this was a good thing in my book

As we had 7 diners, it seemed the right thing to order all 7 starters! This gave us a variety of dishes, ranging from a spicy but well balanced vermicelli salad to cheong fun little parcels of beef and mushroom to a DIY lettuce parcel to be self filled with a pancake. It was like eating in someone's home but a home with a great chef in the kitchen

For main course, it had to be the pho. I went for spicy soup and a mixture of cooked and raw beef. Don't be alarmed if you order this and the dish arrives with literally raw beef on top. Just dunk it in the soup and it will cook in no time. The soup has tremendous depth of flavour, complex and satisfying. I would say this is the best pho I've tasted in London

In the Far East, the best food is usually to be found in smaller establishments and this seems to be true here too. Don't let the word cafe put you off. Come down here for the pho in town