OneV Pho Bistro

Even though recently opened Vietnamese restaurants Boban and OneV Pho Bistro are technically separate, they have a lot more in common than one might initially gather. In Garden Grove, they’re co-located in the same building, OneV on the left side with a full dining room, and Boban on the right side with a counter and a small cafe-style seating area. Look through a large glass window and you’ll see an office space for OneV Group, a local investment company backing both restaurants alongside rapidly expanding Chino Hills-based ice cream chain Nobibi, and Royal, a banquet hall restaurant in Westminster. When we entered the building, we quickly guessed that OneV and Boban are at least partially commonly run, and that turned out to be true; at a minimum, there’s some overlapping family management in this location.

Like Boban, which has one name on its signage and another (seemingly outdated) on parts of its website, OneV Pho Bistro was apparently conceived as Pho OneV – a name that still appears both inside the OneV Group office space and the restaurant’s URL. But the restaurant appears to be moving ahead under the OneV name, initially with a very different service experience and menu concept than Boban’s. Here, there’s a full dining room, multiple people staffing the floor and front counter, and a fleet of robotic assistants delivering dishes to tables. Instead of using touchscreen tablets to order, guests are handed a single-sided, single-page menu neatly summarizing four basic appetizers ranging from potato or sweet potato fries ($7 each) to plates of egg rolls or crispy chicken wings ($13), plus two styles of pho (beef or chicken) at $16 price points. Dry noodle bowls are also available for $17 each, with chicken rice or salad plates at $16. A short list of drinks includes sodas ($3.50 to $6.50), Vietnamese coffees ($5.50) and Thai teas ($6.50), and coconut drinks ($6.50). For the time being, that’s it.

As we were visiting OneV and Boban at the same time, we kept our order here simple, selecting one bowl of beef pho, one plate of egg rolls, and one drink. Perhaps predictably, the pho was the best part of our OneV meal: The $16 price allows you to choose any combination of beef parts ranging from rare ribeye to brisket, tripe, flank, tendon, and meat balls – in our case, all of the above – in addition to standard rice noodles, cilantro, shallots, and white onions. Though that price isn’t cheap in any absolute sense of the word, it’s par these days for pho at many OC places, and the comparatively high quality of OneV’s ribeye is obvious, remaining tender from initial rare arrival to medium rare as it steeped in the broth, with other pieces all tasting really nice as well. While neither the bowl nor the quantity of rice noodles was huge, we enjoyed every bit of what was there, including the lightly oiled but still beefy broth, which OneV proudly notes uses no MSG.