PHỞ HANNA

The name is a family one, and PHO HANNA carries it over a corner of Scottsdale Plaza in Guelph's south end. The restaurant opened in 2025 as an independent Vietnamese-and-Thai kitchen, built inside a renovated bubble-tea unit and run as a family business that local reporting called a labour of love. Pho leads, the way the name promises, but the menu was put together far wider than a single-dish counter — Vietnamese soups opening into Thai specialties, rice plates, vermicelli bowls, a full vegetarian section, and a drink program held over from the unit it replaced.

The soup section is where the kitchen sets its centre of gravity. Special Rice Noodle Soup is the house anchor, the bowl that reads the restaurant fastest and the one to order first if you want to know what the place is about. It sits at the top of a pho list that runs past the standard rare-beef bowl into Hue Style Beef Noodle — spicier, more regional, and a clear sign the kitchen isn't coasting on the most familiar order in the category. Chicken rice-noodle soup and wonton egg-noodle soup fill out the range beneath them. The move is to start there and let the rest of the table decide whether to stay in broth or branch out. A table that never looks past the soup can still eat several ways — more than most pho places can honestly claim.

Past the soup, the menu keeps opening. The Thai side carries real weight rather than a token listing: Crying Tigers is the specialty that pulls a meal off the broth entirely, flanked by Pad Thai, Drunken Noodle, Cashew Nut, Singapore Noodle, Thai Mussels, and a Mango Stir Fry that give a group a second track to order along. The Vietnamese rice and vermicelli sections handle the everyday, plate-in-front-of-you orders — grilled pork chop with egg meatloaf, the Special House Vermicelli, grilled-pork and meatball bowls — the kind of food that fills a weeknight table without ceremony. It is a lot of menu for one compact kitchen, and it is arranged so that pho, Thai, and rice each get a lane of their own.

The vegetarian cooking is the tell that the breadth is deliberate. A dedicated Vegan Lovers and Vegetarian section gives meatless diners a real path through the menu — Vegetables Pad Thai, salt-and-pepper golden tofu, tofu rolls, vegetarian fried rice, and vegetable noodle dishes — built in rather than offered as a single substitution. The drink program is the other holdover with intent: the bubble tea that came with the former unit stays on, milk teas and fruit teas next to Vietnamese iced coffee, so a fifteen-minute stop for a drink counts as much as a full dinner. Appetizers like salt-and-pepper calamari, shrimp rolls, and mango salad give the start of a meal its own reasons to linger.

For a restaurant a year old, PHO HANNA already knows what it is. It converted a drink kiosk into a casual table-service dining room, kept a first-party reservation page so a group can book ahead instead of gambling on a phone-order counter, and set all of it down in Scottsdale Plaza, within reach of the university and the neighbourhoods around Stone Road. The menu answers that address directly: soup for one person on a weeknight, bubble tea for a quick stop, and enough across pho, Thai, rice, and vermicelli to carry a full table at prices a student can plan around. The kiosk became a place you sit down for a bowl of Special Rice Noodle Soup — with the bubble tea still waiting by the door.