By: Ana Maria Mejia Morales
This is SFU Eats, a segment dedicated to filling your tummies, warming your hearts, and keeping your wallet a little bit chubbier than usual. As we all know, it’s hard to maintain a diet, let alone a healthy one, when you are a student. It is this segment’s aim to keep you informed about restaurants surrounding our three communities (Surrey, Vancouver, and Burnaby) that are student-friendly. What makes something student-friendly, you ask? Three things: the service is fast, the people are friendly and helpful, and the meal is under $15, but will leave you fully satisfied.
Just in front of Harbour Centre lies a restaurant that’s about 15 metres square filled with probably the happiest, nicest, and most hard-working Vietnamese women you will come across in your entire life. The tiny restaurant is located at 550 West Hastings Street (adjacent to the Delta Hotels) and serves, as its name explains, delicious, authentic, and homemade Vietnamese food.
The menu includes salad rolls, which are rice paper rolls filled with noodles, lettuce, cucumber, and your desired protein: either shrimp, pork, or chicken salad. There is also authentic Vietnamese noodle soup (starting at $7.25), which you can either order with chicken, chicken balls, beef, or beef balls. For fans of meat, there is even the “All-About-Beef Noodle Soup” which has so much meat you will require a nap after eating it.
Then come the subs, which start at $4.50 and are so good my mouth waters just thinking about them. They are made with this heavenly bread (the texture is a mix between baguette and bun) and filled with a ton of veggies and your desired protein. You can also go crazy and add avocado if that’s what your foodie heart desires. There are also the classic plates of rice or vermicelli, which tend to be the starch, a protein, and some veggies, that start at $7.50. You could also add a pop to any of the plates mentioned above and get a sweet combo, or get one of the smoothies for $4.95 and get your intake of daily fruit in liquid form.
For those of you who tend to stay away from eating anything that has eyes or legs, there is also an avocado spring roll, a tofu and veggie noodle soup, and a vegetarian sub, all fantastic and filled with deliciousness. The staff are incredibly nice there, so if there is anything that you will not want to eat, they will personalize your order accordingly.
Pholicious has been with me on those late Friday nights when I should be having some kind of fun, but instead I was in the library finishing a 4,000-word paper. It’s also been with me at 10 a.m. in the morning when I was craving a fresh smoothie and was too lazy to go anywhere that required me to move more than ten metres. If you are in a rush, you can also call or order online and simply pick your order up, no need to sit down. Pholicious sits close to my heart by feeding me delicious rice noodles. It’s fast, the staff will constantly spoil you, and it’s great on your student wallet.
