Moonlight Restaurant

Intro
Moonlight Restaurant –Recommended
1919 South Jackson Street
Seattle, WA 98144-2224
Phone: (206) 322-3378

Met up our friends from DC who used to live in Seattle and they recommended this Vietnamese restaurant that looked like it was straight out of Happy Days – neon lights, wood paneled walls. Ignoring the décor, the pho kicked a ridiculous amount of ars. There’s a huge Vietnamese population in the Seattle area and the pho broth would make you laugh at anything served in the NY/NJ area.

Our Menu
Pho Dac Biet ***
Oh how wonderful this broth is. It’s subtly sweet, but with a great beef flavor and incredibly rich – very balanced and light years better than any pho broth I’ve had out East. Then comes the perfect noodles – a nice chew and really perfectly cooked. The meat had good flavor, but it was like most pho joints out east – a bit tougher in texture.

Cha Gio
My other go to item for Vietnamese food – basically a fried pork spring roll. The texture of the skin was a tad too crumbly – almost like a cheap Americanized Chinese spring roll. I’m more used to a chun gyun (dim sum fried spring roll) texture. Also, the filling barely had any pork at all.

Mongolian Beef (vegetarian) ---
Definitely a WTF in a bad way. This was like a sweetened beef jerky except much tougher in texture- fried to an almost jagged edge where this could potentially cut the inside of your mouth. No bueno.

Lemongrass Chicken (vegetarian) *
This was pretty fun and flavorful - sweet, a little heat, some brightness with the lemongrass. Oddly enough, the texture was pretty much spot on like chicken even though it was an abomination of tofu and some other vegetarian concoction

Rating System
--- WTF - in a bad way (no stars - poor to average) * Good ** Great *** WTF – in a good way


Overall Restaurant Experience

• Food (8.0/10) – Delicious pho, but the other dishes were a little iffy. Also, it was funny since they had a ton of chinese dishes as well (kung po chicken, general tso's, etc) but I'm pretty sure the owners/servers were Vietnamese.
• Service (7.0/10) – The place was dead and it took a while for the food to be served.
• Atmosphere (8.5/10) – See Happy Days description in the intro. The place was pretty dead for a Sunday at 7:30pm. There was only one other couple there in the entire place. I did kinda dig the kitschy feel with the neon lights and all the tv's everywhere, which I've heard is used for karaoke at night - bonus!
• Price (8.0) - About $20 a couple including tip, so 100% worth it although the non pho dishes weren't great.

Closing Comments
There's a joint near the inlaws house that served pho with ridiculously marbled/flavored beef, so definitely need to hit that up for a point of comparison.