Lotus Café at 8077 Georgia Ave. in downtown Silver Spring will close its doors at the end of July, according to The MoCo Show.
According to the report, Lotus Café has been serving the Silver Spring community for nearly 15 years. The restaurant, which is ranked #45 of 203 Silver Spring restaurants on Tripadvisor, has received over 400 Yelp reviews and over 350 reviews on Google, earning 4.4 and 4.4 stars, respectively. Eater readers named Lotus Café’s pho a soup to try in 2012.
During his tenure at Washington City Paper, Washington Post food critic Tim Carman named the pho with eye of round his Dish of the Week in 2009:
Forget hamburgers for a moment. Here’s a beef dish you can believe in, even at a place like Lotus Cafe, which casts a wider net than your average tuna fisherman. Seriously, a Vietnamese restaurant that serves calamari fries, coconut shrimp, and a Sex on the Beach cocktail? Is this place channeling Saigon or Cancun?
It’s best to go simple here. Order the large pho with eye of round ($7.50), which Lotus does very well. The broth is as fragrant as a spice house and packs plenty of beef flavor. Lotus’ eye of round is sliced thin, which makes for some succulent eating once the meat has been seasoned by the broth. Lotus also dumps a rice paddy’s worth of vermicelli into its soup, far too much for the kind of balance I prefer, but the noodles make for fine slurping, particularly on Lotus’ outdoor patio with the gorgeous view of…the Red Line.
The restaurant had previously received a facelift in 2016, following a paint job with a red color scheme.
It is not known whether a new restaurant will take over the space. The Source will update as more information becomes available.
Photo by David Lay