25 July 2010

Pho 236 Review & Menu - Vietnamese ~ King Street - Newtown



Pho 236 on King Street Newtown has been serving Vietnamese street food classics for ten years or so.



Pho 236 is your basic hole-in-the-wall joint and has to be one of the best value feeds in Newtown. The food is good though not on par with the Vietnamese joints of Marrickville or Cabramatta, but dangnabbit it's cheap. It has all the signs of street food goodness such as the condiment set on every table...



...and the classic pho fixins.



The pho is good value but lacks that certain unidentifiable magic something that makes a great pho, I don't know what it is but it's just not as nice as a pho from Marrickville or even Enmore Delicious Rolls. Perhaps the cooking has more of a Chinese influence here, I'm unsure. But at $7.80 I can't complain even though I just did.



Miss Chicken loves her offal and orders the special pho which has some extra innards and meatballs. Again it's good value but lacks that special pho magic. Miss Chicken would have liked more gizzards in her soup, but it's not really a gizzard-friendly part of town, what can we expect. Still, at $8.50 it is great value.



Steamed chicken with ginger rice. Lovely plain medicinal steamed chook with a healthy dose of veggies, and the light ginger flavour to the plain rice is a nice touch. Very tasty and great value at $7.80.



Sweet chili sauce dunking sauce for the chicken, yum, dipping the brocolli in this was a taste sensation.



Pho 236 is at, you guessed it, 236 King Street Newtown. The place is often packed which explains how they manage to serve such cheap food in rent-heavy Newtown.



Pho 236 menu.



Click to enlarge menu, if you want to.



We stop at King on King Asian Grocers (397 King Street, down near the Sandringham Hotel) on the way home for some supplies. We try some mochi for afternoon tea.



These are gelatinous balls dusted with coconut and we think the centre is red bean paste. The green one is green tea flavour. These remind us that no matter how much Asian food we eat we still have western palettes, some things we just don't get, but it's always fun to try :-)

Pho 236 on Urbanspoon

7 comments:

  1. normally the green mochi's we get in london are pandan flavour, i love mochi's!

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  2. I had one of the worst meals ever in this place - the Vietnamese classic of grilled pork on vermicelli noodles with salad. I have eaten this dish at Vietnamese restaurants around the world, but this was inedible. The pork was not grilled but cooked in a wok with gloopy sauce, enough pork for three people and cut really thick. No salad. It was grey, tasteless and tough. Really terrible food, the serve was way too big with no Vietnamese flavours or freshness.

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  3. Reading your blog makes me miss Sydney so much. I lived in Newtown for 3 years and Glebe for 1.5, and Pho 236 was one of my favourite cheapy dinners. Not on par with 'proper pho', but good enough for a quick fix. Now I live in Holland, there's not so much pho (decent or dodgy) around..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Come back to sydney Erica and I will shout you some pho at this place.
      I live in Newtown so you can live through me.
      Whay did you leave so soon?

      Delete
  4. Not a fan of the pho, but their laksa is brilliant.

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  5. I've been here numerous times and although I've had better pho, it was definitely happy days for my stomach. May I recommend the most famous and delicious pho store in Cabramatta? Pho 54 is home of the best pho I've ever eaten, and of course, I return continuously.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for your comment joy - please keep your musings happy - if you want to complain about a restaurant please do it on a restaurant review site (or your own blog) - we're all about celebrating cultural diversity and the great eats that come along with it :-)

Our ethics: We pay for all our own meals and travel (though sometimes Mum shouts us).