Ba-Lê French Coffee Shop

Fails to deliver a pleasant experience. The decor is typical for the area, but the food failed to shine in the way that it typically does in Oakland Chinatown.

Banh Mi...excellent! Close to our condo at Jack London Square, so happy to have discovered this place.

Old school restaurant. They don't accept credit cards, so be forewarned, but the food was very good. I had a beef and egg noodle soup and it was delicious.

This place is a home away from home. I grew up in a Vietnamese home where the food was made with honest live whole my mom talked on the phone with my "aunties" gossiping and chatting away. It's an Asian mom thing. Here, while you eat, the ladies in a single sentence will weave between Hokkien, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Listening to the banter and laughing put me back home in my mom or my grandma's presence. It helped me emotionally during the pandemic while traveling home was a bit more sensitive or harder. Now the food. One test I like to do with pho is I'd take home the soup and refrigerate it. If the soup turns to jello it's truly made from painstaking beef broth simmered for hours. If the soup is liquid, it's powder based beef stock. Needless to say this place does it the right way with real beef broth. Come taste it, you'll see what I mean. Cash only

Chicken pho and beef noodle soups were delicious and the fresh ginger on the side was a nice touch.

Food was heavenly

The best of the best. Every other bahn mi place you can taste the shortcuts and the savings that they take on their meat, not here. The freshest, and tastiest sandwiches around! I highly recommend this shop to any Bahn Mi lovers!

Delicious pho and bahn mi sandwhich! Def adding to the rotation, check it out! Also some of the best street art in the entire Bay is here, and nowhere else, period.