Ben Thanh

The Pho Special is the bowl that orients a first visit to Ben Thanh — a clear, long-simmered Vietnamese soup that tells a new table where the kitchen starts. What sits around it is the surprise. The same Appleby Line menu carries Thai green curry and pad thai, a full dim sum run of shrimp ha gow, chive dumplings and custard buns, and then ramen, congee, vermicelli bowls and rice-plate stir-fries besides. Most pho houses stop at pho. This one keeps going, and that reach is the whole identity: a Vietnamese-and-Thai restaurant in Burlington's Appleby Village built to give a mixed table latitude rather than a single house style.

The range is easiest to read across a single order. The Vietnamese side runs from the Pho Special to BBQ Beef Vermicelli Bowls, with light starters like Fresh Shrimp Salad Rolls and Vietnamese Spring Rolls to open; the Thai side centres on Green Curry and Pad Thai, a Mango Salad on hand to cut the richness. A dedicated dim sum section pulls Shrimp Ha Gow, Chive Dumplings, Cream Cheese Wontons and sweet Custard Buns to the front of the meal. A row of chicken plates — Lemon Grass Chicken with peppers and onion, a barbecue version in a sweet-and-spicy sauce, a sweet-and-sour tamarind cousin — holds at a moderate price just under sixteen dollars, and Mango Sticky Rice waits at the end. For two or more, a sound order pairs Pad Thai with Green Curry as complementary mains, then opens with a small dim sum plate before committing to anything larger.

None of it reads as fusion. Pho stays pho, curry stays curry, and the dim sum arrives on its own terms; the breadth comes from setting whole traditions side by side rather than blending them. The effect is a kitchen that treats variety as its discipline — the reason one order can cover a pho loyalist, a curry-seeker and a diner who came only for dumplings. The restaurant frames itself plainly around bringing people together over Vietnamese and Thai food, and the service matches it: warm and attentive, casual rather than fussy, easy for a multigenerational table where a child wants familiar noodles and a grandparent wants congee.

That flexibility scales past the dining room. Individual bowls and entrées suit a weekday lunch or a solo dinner; shareable starters let a group test several directions at once; and a separate party-tray menu, running from the low thirties to about sixty dollars, handles the larger gatherings a house party or an office lunch calls for. A dinner-vegetable section gives vegetarians a starting point, though broths and sauces are worth a direct question when a diet is strict. Lunch covers the same ground as dinner, beer and wine are on hand for the tables that want them, and the Burlington location keeps long days — from eleven in the morning to ten most nights, later on Fridays and Saturdays — with delivery routed through DoorDash. There is no online reservation link, so a big table is a phone call to Appleby Line rather than a booking form.

Appleby Village gets steady use out of a place like this. For a Burlington table that wants Southeast Asian food without settling on one country's kitchen, Ben Thanh is the easy answer; for a household on a night nobody wants to cook, it is a short DoorDash order away. The long menu is really one kitchen working several jobs at once — a bowl of pho for a single diner, a party tray sent out to a gathering down the line, a first-timer who came for the Pho Special and stayed for the dumplings.