Cafe Mama Pho

Really a nice surprise. I eat asian food quite often and this café didn’t disappoint me at all. The bar is like a typical diner, few tables, no frills, but really authentic Vietnamese dishes for cheap. Perfect stop if you’re around in the area. Friendly staff.

Best Vietnamese restaurant by far near London and I’m a Vietnamese Californian so that should says a lot there. The service, the price are just right on. What a great surprise from this trip

Excellent little vietnamese restaurant in Surrey quays. Beef phở is one of the best in London. Service is quick

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

By far the best Vietnamese place that I’ve been to. It’s not fancy but good for value and most importantly. it’s DELICIOUS!

Lots is already written about this tiny Phở joint and most of it is both good and spot on. We are locals and this is our favourite local eatery. On the last visit we shared a prawn phở and a rice dish with fried beef. The portions are very large and filling, the phở was incredibly spicy but in a healthy, ‘clears your passages’ kind of way.
One star less than perfect because they hardly have any vegetarian options (maybe one salad and fried egg rolls) and this shouldn’t be the case in 2016. But they cater to demand I guess.

My favourite is phở tai chin. Hopefully, I spelled that correctly. It the mix of raw and cooked beef slices on a very rich and spicy broth. My favourite appetiser is the bahn cuon. They are just perfect. When I’m really hungry, I go for the grilled pork rice. Really nice dipping sauce, sweet sour and spicy.

Love mama phở since 2011. This is the place to go if you need simple, tasty, no nonsense bowl of phở. I just wish I live nearby so I get to go more often!

Went here for dinner, I would recommend getting there earlyish as it tends to get busy and be prepared to share your table with other customers!
To start we had the Vietnamese prawn spring rolls with the peanut dipping sauce which was sooo tasty. There were only 3 spring rolls cut into halves but they were pretty big so by the time our main arrived we were quite full.
For the main I had chicken phở and the portions were absolutely huge which was great because it tasted so good!
Will definitely be coming back here soon.

Finally made it! Heard so much about this lovely restaurant however never made effort to visit. I have to say I really hope Café East could have Mama Phở’s starters and to combine the Café Easy’s main courses together. The starters are a lot more better than the Café East, but I couldn’t tell difference about the mains. Perhaps it is because the taste are so close and Mama Phở is a bit distant so that most ppl go to Café East. I found the lovely sausage which Café East stopped serving years ago, it is very authentic indeed!

A tiny café which is a sister establishment to Café East at Canada Water. Mama Phở is a brilliant family-​run Vietnamese café which serves authentic dishes bursting with flavour.
Their noodle dishes are definitely the stars of the menu with both noodle broth and summer noodles equally as tantalizing as each other.
The portions are reasonable — large depending on what you order — and at a very reasonable price. It is very achievable to have two drinks and two main meals for £20. Don’t expect anything fancy, what you see is what you get but the food is most definitely worth it.
The place doesn’t serve alcohol but you can BYOB.

Excellent– authentic and tasty. Reasonably priced.
The grilled pork with rice was fantastic.
Very casual ambience with many locals and Vietnamese natives.
Highly recommended for a casual and authentic, tasty meal.

We started with the prawn summer rolls, packed with vegetables and a slice of pork, nicely garnished with cilantro & mint. We then had the lemongrass grilled pork on a bed of rice (it was perfect) and the phở with raw & cooked beef (very good). Iced coffee was a nice treat at the end.
Venue is small and very casual, a good lunch spot.

Mixed thoughts about this place, Phở was good, I chose rare beef only phở, could have done with more noodles, beef was tasty though and a good portion size. The all-​important soup base was good and had a pleasant amount of flavour. This place really fell down on the extras which weren’t phở…
Crispy springs were dull and not with the nice bubbly traditional roll pastry… the steamed rolls tasted like a poor meat replacement, though the pastry itself was good. Their version of dipping sauce was neither vinegary enough or fish saucey enough.
Service is sketchy, one of the starters wasn’t available which we weren’t told they bought the starters out. The teapot leaked from the get go and my cold tapioca drink, though delicious and a great cold-​coconut compliment to my soup, took forever to arrive.
The place was busy throughout our visit and I think that I would return, but only for phở, perhaps the name of the place is representable of the best thing about this café.

I really liked my meal here. The food was fresh and tasted home-​cooked. My friend and I were pleased we visited as an alternative to Café East because we wanted to try somewhere new. When we were there, a whole multi-​generational family were dining together, including grandparents and aunties and kiddies. Pretty good sign, right?
There’s nothing fancy at all about the ambience and the service. Per its name, it is a café not a restaurant — it is also really quite small. If you’re going to go with a large group, call ahead.

This is the first Vietnamese restaurant I’ve been to in London and was completely underwhelmed. The phở was very oily and one dimensional. The meat that came with rice dishes was good but to be authentic it should have come with broken rice. The fish sauce provided was also sparse, barely enough to call it a drizzle — I want more!

Mama phở is very small so I do not recommend coming here in large group. But the food was nice and a nice alternative if you find Café East is closed (like we did), since they are both not far from each other.
The menu has a range of phở and rice dishes, along with a selection of sides. As it is called Mama Phở then it must be about the phở, so I ordered the Phở Chin which had the cooked beef (or well done beef as on menu).
The soup I found was bland at first so I added some of the fish dipping which gave it a bit more flavouring. But the cooked beef itself have a lot of flavour which compliment the broth and the phở which lack flavouring.
Along with our phở we ordered the Banh Cuon (Vietnamese steamed rolls) and Cha Hue (Deep fried Vietnamese sausage) to share. Both was nice and you could have on its own if you are not very hungry.
From the outside it might not have that look that says come in for tasty Vientamese food. But Mama Phở does serve decent Vientamese food.

Excellent.
Les plats sont frais et copieux mais attention, épicé, c’est épicé ! Les phở sont vraiment très bons.
La salle n’est pas très grande en revanche.

Yum, I had the Phở Tai Chin, and it was really good, which is phở with a mix of cooked and raw beef, but next time I think I want to get only raw beef! When it cooks in the hot soup, it becomes tender and very juicy. The phở here is not the very best I have ever had, but it is still damn good! I ordered mine «half spicy», but it still came out pretty spicy! Order full-​on spicy if you know you can handle the heat!
My boyfriend and I split some goi cuon, and they were delicious. Light, fresh with great texture and a yummy dipping sauce. I would definitely would recommend this if you are looking for a light starter before your main.
For dessert, we each ordered a vietnamese iced coffee. Semi-​sweet and refreshing!
Overall, this place is really cute with friendly staff. The food was delicious, fresh and very quick.
NOTE: THIS PLACE IS CASH ONLY!
There are cashpoints near the petrol station (free cash) and the McDonald’s on either side of the restaurant.

Mama Phở is in a totally random location and it looks unassuming and small from the outside, but inside it serves comfort food to warm you completely on a cold winter day. It serves about the same menu as its sister restaurant Café East but is ¼ of Café East’s size.
I ordered the combination phở (consisting of a protein medley of chicken, raw beef that cooks as it’s dunked in hot broth, prawn). I enjoyed the meat and rice noodles, but found the broth a bit too salty.
However I did enjoy the pork with vermicelli noodles. The pork was crispy with that perfectly barbequed taste and tasted delicious with the julienned carrots and lettuce.
The Banh Cuon is my favorite dish at both Mama Phở and Café East. The BC here seems to be larger, while Café East’s is smaller and has better meat to rice noodle proportion.
Don’t leave here without trying one of their tapioca drinks! It’s especially refreshing after all the savories.

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 Phở’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 phở. 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 phở 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 café put you off. Come down here for the phở in town