Lucky Corner

 

For my first post, I decided to go to a local favorite of mine, Lucky Corner. Lucky Corner is an authentic Vietnamese restaurant located in the northern section of Downtown in Frederick.

I decided to make a lunch trip to Lucky Corner today, Sunday, February 10, 2013. When you first pull into the parking lot, you will notice how small it is; same thing goes for the restaurant itself! If there are no parking spots then the restaurant is packed. I was lucky enough to get the last open spot along with the last available table. I got there around 1:30pm and was seated right after they cleaned up the table. I only had to wait for about two minutes. The ambiance is okay, it was warm because it was so crowded in such a tiny room. I feel like they could fix up the place a little like change the tiles and repaint the walls, but they do have a flat-screen TV placed above a fireplace. I opened up the menu and my stomach began to grumble even more. The menu contained over thirty or forty different options! Sometimes this can be a good or bad thing because customers might take a while to read over it, but you have a lot of choices to pick from. After about five minutes or so, the server took the orders for drinks and disappeared. I flipped through the menu multiple times because I could not decide what I wanted. I was not sure if I was in the mood for noodles or rice!

The server came back about ten minutes later which felt pretty long to me. I understand that it was busy, but I was hungry! As a regular, I know that the service at Lucky Corner is pretty slow. I think the food is definitely worth the wait, though. I ordered the "Crispy Calamari," as an appetizer and a regular sized bowl of "Pho Bo Vien," as my main course. Pho Bo Vien is a classic in my book; it's rice noodles in a beef broth with beef meat balls.

The appetizer came out first about fifteen minutes later (pictured on the top left). Honestly, I have had better fried calamari because it seemed a bit more creamy than other places that I have had it at. I think the calamari could have tasted more fresh as opposed to pulling the squid out of the freezer and cooking it. The bowl of pho came out about five minutes later, I was still eating my appetizer when it came out so the table got a little crowded. The picture on the bottom left shows how the pho looks like when it is first served. The two pictures on the right show how it looks after I put Sriracha (spicy) sauce and Hoisin (sweet) sauce. The beef broth is very bold and flavorful especially with the two sauces. Eating pho without the sauces is too plain for me! The noodles were a little too soft for me because they fell apart so quickly. Like the noodles, the meat balls were soft too. It usually takes about five or six bites for me to chew the meat balls, but it took only two or three and they were ready to get into my stomach!

I sat at Lucky Corner for about an hour and a half. Overall, my experience was okay. As I stated before, this restaurant is a local favorite, but this time it was not as good as it usually is. The broth was great, but I could not get over how soft the noodles were! The service was slow, but that was expected. My total including tip was $18; the bowl of pho was $7.25 and the calamari was around $7. I probably won't be here for a while unless I want to try something other than pho and if I have time to sit around and wait.