Pho Hong restaurant review

Pho Hong: the small Vietnamese restaurant tucked in between Asian grocers and other foodsellers of varying cultural origins on the stretch of Fraser street between 43rd and 49th. My housemates and I thought it might be a nice place for a beer, or rather, the most likely place to sell beer. In my experience the Vietnamese enjoy drinking the liquid, and this venue was open until 10pm - later than any of its neighbors.
"PHO HONG. VIETNAMESE CUISINE - BEEF NOODLE SOUP. LICENSED" it says out the front. A sign on the door says "cash only."
Promising.

We walk in and it's pretty empty. One guy sitting at a table for two. A couple somewhere. A waitress approaches us and asks, "three?"
"Three," I say, holding up three fingers, and she directs us to a table for six. We sit.
The waitress places six chopsticks, some napkins, and three cups of tea on the table, then disappears again. We chuckle at the fact that she brought us tea when we have zero intention of ordering meals. We look at the menus, the specials page buried under the plate of glass on the table, the regular menu a sheet of laminated pink paper. On the back, under "Beverages:", down the bottom of the page, Local Beer $4, Import Beer $4.50. Good prices, although the lack of an actual list of local or import beers is dubious. Although we've already eaten dinner I decide to order something small, "COMBO A" for myself and my male housemate to share. The female housemate settles on a pear-shaped ice cream dessert.

Again the waitress appears and begins taking our orders. The housemate to my left goes first.
"I'll have this pear desert, and one of your local beers," she says.
The waitress scribbles something down on her notepad and looks back up at the housemate. She just stares, waiting for something.
"Can you tell me what they are?" the housemate says.
"Budweiser and Canadian," says the waitress.
"I'll have Canadian."
"That's it, ice cream and beer?"
"Yep! Thank you."
The waitress writes that down and then looks back up at the rest of us. She doesn't make eye contact, and her gaze is sort of floating around between me and the other guy.
I guess I'll speak.
"I'll have Combo A to share between us," indicating my other housemate.
She doesn't write anything down, just continues looking at me.
"Combo A? Can I have that? To share?"
"Yes."
"Okay. And a Canadian, too, please."
The four of us are silent and unmoving for a short time, and then the final one of our table speaks, the one I'm sharing with.
"I'll just have the Canadian."
The waitress leaves.

We talk among ourselves in hushed voices about how strange that interaction was. Why didn't she talk? The couple sitting at a table nearby - the only table with more than one occupant - gets up and leaves.
Then we realise that the place is almost totally silent. This was why we'd been so hushed, that natural thing we instinctively do in quiet places - be quiet ourselves. There's no music, despite the speakers around the place. Nobody is speaking. The guy at the table for two is checking his phone. A girl at the far end deep in the place is using a laptop. We're the only people making any noise at all, so we stop, and sit there in silence, looking at each other and around the place, waiting for it to end.

The waitress bring us our beers with glasses, and the pear ice cream, and leaves. We're thankful for something to occupy ourselves. The dessert looks like Salvador Dali's version of the neat and symmetrical thing in the picture-menu. It's deformed, lopsided, misshapen, and when my friend tries to cut into it with her spoon she actually has to cut, sawing with the spoon like a knife. It's solid and there are ice crystals on the surface.
I'm sitting next to a wall, so right by my head is this big floral print on canvas in what looks like a window frame. There are faux-windows everywhere, in fact, the opposite wall is a row of small alcoves with candles inside and wooden slatted window shutters on either side. Red brick walls. The ceiling has some kind of droopy texture - like far too much paint has been slopped on there and started to drip into little mini spiky stalactites as it dries. There's a section of the place with a lattice on the ceiling covered with creeping vines which are probably plastic. I'm getting a real Italian vibe, maybe Spanish. I'm not good with vibes.

After a few minutes of silence one of my tablemates whispers, "why isn't there any music?"
Nobody responds.
Then we hear a short ditty from somewhere in the room, a little microtune lasting about two seconds. It's annoying and strange, like a sound from a crap video game. Is it from the man with the phone? The girl with the laptop? Or some other source? It happens every few minutes.
"I want to leave right now," says one housemate.
"Me too," says the other.

Finally our food arrives.
One skewer of pork and one of chicken, and a spring roll sliced into quarters. We divide this between ourselves according to who wants what, and it tastes disappointing. The meat is tough and flavourless. The spring rolls are the best bit, followed by the steamed rice.
The food is gone quickly for two reasons: there isn't much of it and we are anxious to leave.
The beers are still half-full but that's no matter. We down them.
Let's pay for this and get out of here, we say, and so we wait for a while but the waitress is having a conversation with someone at another table. When she's done she walks past us back to the kitchen, and I hold out my arm waving at her saying, "excuse me, hey, hi," but she doesn't notice and walks right on by.
"Well then," I say, "I guess we pay over there."
So we walk over to the back of the restaurant, where the waitress is doing embroidery or something on one of the tables, and the girl who was on the laptop gets up and operates the cash register. Now she can't find our bill. There's a collection of them spread out on the desk. I don't know why there are more checks than there are patrons. The girl has a Vietnamese conversation with the waitress who's sitting nearby. And eventually they figure out which table we were sitting at.
It comes out to around $30. We pay (cash) and bug out.

One of the strangest dining experiences I've had. So awkward it's surreal.