Food Delivery Review: Uber & Vietnam House - Fortitude Valley

For foodies who regularly read the news (or go online for that matter), would not fail to have noticed the hype about UberEats finally arriving in Brisbane. With quite a few of my colleagues being big fans of Uber, we decided to try it out and order lunch from them. On my part, it made an interesting comparison to our previous order from Foodora. Working in the CBD, it wouldn't have made sense for us to order food from a nearby restaurant, so to make best of the limited time free delivery offer, we deliberated for a while between restaurants from the Valley or from West End, after much passionate debate, we ended up deciding on Vietnam House, from Fortitude Valley.

Like Uber, UberEats is soley app based, meaning that in the context of making a group order for lunch isn't as simple as sending around a link on a website and getting orders from people, as it meant I had to pass my phone around to take orders from colleagues so they could see the menu.

  

Compared to other food delivery sites, I note that UberEats lacks the option to preorder and have delivery set at a specified time, rather each restaurant has a set delivery time from the point of the order being placed. I find this somewhat cumbersome, since we got food delivered because we were obviously too busy to go out, to have to take the time out exactly 30-40 mins before lunch time to put the order in seems somewhat counter intuitive. Having said that, I did like the little GPS tracker showing how far away the delivery was, I also appreciated having the contact button, which allows me to phone the delivery guy if I have any issues with the order like last time. I also note that the estimated delivery time fluctuated quite a bit during the time whilst I was tracking the order, I guess this could be smoothed out over time.

Our order was delivered, 10 minutes earlier than the time in which we had aimed for. The delivery boy was quite courteous and friendly, and willing to deliver the food to our level (rather than the foyer), which we appreciated.

Our food was very hot, well secured and thankfully all the things we ordered were there.

For entrees, we ordered a serve of two BBQ pork rice paper rolls with hoisin sauce. The rice paper rolls were quite large, to the point where the skin had burst in some areas. Despite it being quite filled, the BBQ pork was very thinly sliced, and the majority of the filling consisted of bulky salad. Without the sauce, I found the roll somewhat bland.

My colleague ordered the crispy skin chicken with rice. He mentioned that it was nice and hot, the chicken wasn't too crispy, but at least it was moist and juicy. What really caught my attention though was how small the portion sizes were, as you can see, the portion filled just past half of the takeaway container. Other restaurants we go to tend to barely be able to cram the portion into the takeaway box.

As mentioned in my earlier posts, I like to evaluate how good a Vietnamese restaurant is by the quality of its pho, which is of course, what I ordered.

Like the crispy skin chicken, I was sorely disappointed by the portion size of the pho, being (what I would consider) approximately two thirds of the full size of phos of my regular Vietnamese haunts such as AJs Noodle House on Charlotte Street or Rice Paper in Warrigal Square. The basil I was provided had quite a few holes in them from insects, which I wasn't too happy about, but I was most disappointed by the beef, which was already pre cooked (thus not rare), and the fact that I was only provided with four super thin slices. On top of this, the soup was also very bland, and quite tasteless other than for the copious amounts of sugar which were added into the broth. Needless to say, this does rank within one of the top three most disappointing phos I've had in Brisbane. 

Price Range: $15 - $20pp

Taste: 3/10
Value: 2/10
Service: 8/10 (the Uber guy was friendly)
Environment: N/A (my own desk at work)