Saigon Vietnamese Kitchen

I had issues with the service. They made an error on my order and made me feel like I was at fault and did not make the situation right. I felt like they didn’t care about me as a customer, which may be reflected in how they handle their business in general. Unfortunate.

Take other reviewers with a grain of salt, Saigon Café is fantastic. Great phở-​style soups, really good noodle dishes as well as the best stir fried rice in Santa Fe. Contrary to the reviewer with many check-​ins but who received the wrong orders «90%» of the time, I have never received an incorrect takeout order from Saigon. Service is entirely acceptable, Saigon is a small spot that gets crazy busy sometimes and that begets slower service.

I love this place. I used to eat here once a week in college. My go-​to dish was/​is the chow fun with fried tofu. Cheap, tasty, and comfortable.

Can’t say I’ve tasted a representative sample of their menu, but the two soups I tried here were VERY impressive. The chicken curry soup was delicious, rich, just spicy enough, and had some lovely spices going on. The hot and sour soup was like nothing I’ve ever had before — not at all like the Chinese version of the same dish, full of lemongrass flavor and just excellent.
On the whole, this unassuming little place exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. I guess they might be a little inconsistent, but if you want good Vietnamese in Santa Fe what the heck else are you gonna do?

Sat down, and waited for 20 minutes for our order to be taken. Then waited another 45 minutes for the order to be ready, at which point my lunch hour had evaporated, so I had to have the food to go. Food was o.k., but with such slow service, I can’t recommend this place.

We had fantastic Fun (pork and chicken, to be exact). Best greasy noodles in town. We also enjoyed the fried rice. Prices are reasonable. Service is good.

Regular go-​to dish: the catfish cooked in a hotpot. Mmmm.

You know what irritates me more than wasting money… nothing. I order takeout from here about 3 times a week and I’m sick and tired of always being surprised by what I end up getting instead of what I order, If I order soup… I expect it to have brother in it. If I order pork… it means I didn’t want chicken.
Check your order before you leave because 90% chance you will regret it otherwise.

I go here a lot! I just usually get the rice noodle with bell pepper onion fried tofu & cilantro… I add mushrooms & broccoli. It really love this place. Simple Greasy and really fresh. It def looks like a hole in the wall but the dishes are simple and def remind me of the authentic street food. :)
Spring rolls are good too and pretty good.

Yum. Great food

Yummy food with a mini portion and a fine-​diner price.

Tasty beef phở– perfect dash of 5 spice to linger. Just add a little sirachi add the side garnishes, squeeze a bit of line juice and your’re set!

I found myself driving over there to get their chicken salad, which I’d been craving for days! A great light lunch, crisp and full of flavor.

In a town with so few Phở Joints it’s hard to be a critic.
Not to brag but I’ve slurped down a tanker truck or two of Phở, and that being revealed, I’ve had every variety of Phở known to man. I have had this sort of addiction to this ubiquitous Vietnamese Beef Noodle Soup for over a decade now after first discovering it at Phở #1 on Buford Highway in Atlanta Georgia. Yes, Atlanta GA has some of the finest Asian and Pacific Asian cuisine in abundance. Believe it!
Now that I live in the beautiful state of New Mexico, in the majestic city of Santa Fe, I still need to get my Phở on! So far I’ve found three places and with Saigon Café being one of them I could not be kept away with their unsavory Unilocal reviews. The café? It’s dumpy and kinda dark and dingy, but not the worst place I’ve ever slurped the Phở at. That honor belongs to a hole in the wall on 82^nd in SE Portland that bears no name, just a nasty dirty hole that served up Phở better than a lotta joints I been to. The Saigon café offers zero variety for Phở on the menu, only one dish, number 8. It comes with rare eye of round and sliced meatballs. Was it good? You bet it was! Was it great? No way! What it was was average tasty Phở with flavorful broth but not enough onions, but oddly enough they had a scant amount of sweet peas in there. It was not very big but pretty costly at ten bucks for an average tasting medium sized bowl of Phở. The garnish dish was funky to say the least. Jalapeño, lime, coriander cilantro, and mung bean sprout all dried out from sitting in the fridge all day. Plus get this, instead of Basil they offered Purple Shiso on the garnish plate! That was a first for me! Shiso, usually the green variety, is offered as garnish with Japanese Sashimi, or Chirashi, a really fragrant leaf similar to Basil but lighter in intensity. For myself I always order Goi Cuon as an appetizer with my Phở. Theirs were big but like the garnish plate, not fresh and sitting in the fridge all day so it was dried up as well. It was still edible except for the Nuoc Leo (peanut dipping sauce) which for some odd reason had garlic in it –Yuck!
In summation of this review, for which I am only reviewing the atmosphere, Phở and Goi Cuon, I would say that the most disappointing part of this meal was the price. $ 10 for a no choice of meats medium bowl of Phở is no bueno. I’d of been super happy with it at $ 7 or at most $ 7.50. The Goi Cuon for $ 5 is kinda the going rate, but for that price it should be served closer to fresh than these spring rolls were and not have garlic in the peanut sauce.
Would I go back again? That really depends on what happens with Phở Kim and if I get tired of their Phở anytime soon. Lan’s is not really even an option for Phở, but they do have an amazing delicious Vietnamese menu at Lan’s and I’m going to enjoy dining there too because its a super nice place to eat. You know what though? Saigon Café does not need a five star review from me because when I went there for lunch today the tables were full and they were busy serving hungry people that looked happy to be eating their food, so my hat is off to them for their success.
Cheers!

My wife and I decided to go here for a little change to our usual routine. First off the place is extremely small inside and all the tables look like they are about to fall. After sitting down we waited 15 minutes for the waitress to even come up and take our drink order. After ordering we waited another 35 minutes for our food to come. I know that Phở does not take that long to make and neither does Lo Mein, which is what she got. My food was really good, but definitely not worth the wait. Her food was sub par and she ended up only eating half of it. Bad score goes to the atrocious service that we received.

My mom and I had dinner at Saigon Café last week for a little change of pace (we usually like the Greek café next door!). I had checked it out on Unilocal and it received ok reviews and so I thought I’d give it a chance.
The place is a no frills place (typical of most of these cafes, in my experience, so I wasn’t surprised). We were greeted at the door and the café was about half full. There were only two servers and they were polite, but not overly friendly.
My mom and I ordered hot tea (which was never refilled and we were never asked if we needed more — and I didn’t ask — more later). We were given a moment with the menu, but weren’t ready when the server came to take our order so I ordered the cold shrimp spring rolls. Those arrived and we placed our orders: my mom ordered a noodle dish with shrimp and I ordered the traditional Phở.
So the food:
— The spring rolls were some of the biggest I had ever seen and had a generous amount of shrimp. They did have slices of pork or beef in there as well, which I wasn’t used to and didn’t like… it was dry and gross… but the rest of appetizer was yummy!
— My phở was just «ok». I would think it’s really difficult to mess up Phở. It had some sort of «homemade» sausage in it, which was unflavorful and kind of gross, I thought (I didn’t see that it had it on the menu). The broth was tasty with the addition of all of the fixings (fish sauce and Sriacha), but was otherwise bland. ;) I do want to say that there was a generous amount of bean sprouts, mint and cilantro to add to the soup. However, overall, I was a bit disappointed as there was only one Phở option (the one I ordered) and it was unremarkable without the addition of the sauces… the beef also wasn’t the greatest.
— My mom’s noodle dish was just shrimp (which she enjoyed) and the flat noodles. It was a bit greasy and there were ZERO veggies included, which really made it very bland and boring looking.
I lived in DC and visited a number of Vietnamese cafes in the DC metro area and currently live in Phoenix where I’ve visited a couple of Vietnamese places and by those standards and after my experience, I won’t return to this particular café. The prices were rather high for the type and quality of the food (our bill was over $ 40 for tea, two entrees and an appetizer, which seems unheard of in this type of restaurant!), so I was pretty disappointed. Also, our server never came back to check on us — we had to track her down to get to go boxes and our check and we weren’t confident that she would refill our tea and were afraid to ask for more.
If I were you, I would go next door to the cute little Greek café and get not only more bang for you buck, but a better overall experience.

Obviously I can’t expect amazing Vietnamese find in town but I hated Saigon Café. Their spring rolls were not fresh and I had a vermicelli w/​pork dish (very common dish) and the meat was overcooked, dry and tasteless. My fiancé had phở and it was very oily and did not come with standard garnishes (bean sprouts, etc)
I’ve been to Vietnam so I have tried authentic dishes — skip this place and try Phở Kim,

Good, reliable Vietnamese food. The next best is an hour away in Albuquerque.
I haven’t explored the menu much as I always get the same thing. The restaurant is always busy, and that always speaks louder to me than so so reviews.
If you need your Phở fix in Santa Fe, this is the spot.

so-​so Vietnamese food. I ate here a few times, often to get spring rolls or the banana leaf wrapped sweet rice thing they sell. They don’t have many tables, sometimes hard to get seated here. If you head an hour down I-​25 to Albuquerque and explore the International District around Louisiana and Central, you will discover several Vietnamese restaurants which are FAR superior to this one and also cheaper. Lin’s on Cerrillos has much more interesting food, although not necessarily authentic, and more expensive than this place.

It’s a little pricey for Vietnamese food, but it is two blocks from my house, so I thought I’d give it a try. First off, it was super-​packed for the 45 minutes I was there (to pick up a to-​go order that was supposed to be ready in 20 minutes). The one server was totally swamped, but did work the floor like a pro and gave me a free soft drink while I waited.
The vietnamese egg rolls were standard, and I downed them pretty quick. My table of two ordered both the Rice Vermicelli with grilled pork, and the one with grilled chicken and shrimp and both were pretty decent. There was a creepy older couple sitting next to us who kept staring, and the lesbian couple in the booth next to us were super awesome.