6767 Wilson Blvd
Falls Church, VA 22044
(703) 533-8388
(This restaurant does not seem to have a website. If you would like to see the menu, go to Northern Virginia Magazine)
If this were not a blog about our dining experiences in local area restaurants, we could do a better job adhering to the age-old good advice “if you have nothing good to say, then don’t say anything at all.” In the case of Viet Royale, we would be all mum. But this is a forum where we offer to readers our views, and as we have done on numerous occasions in this blog, we can only relay our own experiences, so here goes.
Viet Royale is located inside the famous Eden Center, which is the Vietnamese community’s dining hub in Falls Church. Apparently, this particular restaurant has been around for 20 years and in 2007 band 2008 even made it to the Washingtonian Magazine several times. Maybe something has changed since then, or maybe we just went on a bad night. Granted, it was very crowded, so we may be in the minority of not having had a good experience.
We called in advance to reserve a table for the time we planned to arrive, but were told they only reserve on the half-hour. When we arrived at the time we planned, which was 6:45pm, the 5 of us were seated at a huge round table that would have comfortably sat 12 people. Requests for a smaller table were futile. The man told us that had we told them we were coming earlier he would have made the table available earlier. Duh!!!
Our order was messed up so many times that we lost count. Almost every person in our party had something wrong with their order. We kept having to ask for our water to be refilled every single time. We were then charged for a dish that was never even brought out! Good thing someone in our party caught the mistake, since the bill was all in Vietnamese. It was indeed a busy night at the restaurant, so we can understand that the staff was running around, but we just felt unwelcomed.
Warning to anyone who likes spicy dishes – the dishes they call spicy in this restaurant are definitely not. But they were not even mild, they were bland.
We really think that if we had ordered the Pho we would have been less disappointed with the food, but we will not return to Viet Royale to find out. There are lots of other great Vietnamese restaurants in this area where we would rather go. This place was a “royale” disappointment.
