Kim Po Vietnamese Restaurant

Review Location:
550 Hwy 7 E
Unit 6162A (Times Square)
Richmond Hill, Ontario
(Major Intersection: Leslie & Hwy 7)




The other day I cam here for dinner with some of my friends. I've been here once before a couple years ago, and the place definitely cleaned up both in decor since my last visit. Everything looks much cleaner and more like a restaurant. The one thing they didn't bother to renovate was probably the washroom. Gross and neglected like most Asian places. Luckily, the food got better since I last came too. Out of the 6 of us that went, half of us ordered vermicelli and half of us ordered pho.

 BBQ Pork and Spring Roll Vermicelli

In terms of flavour, this dish was quite enjoyable. The BBQ pork was well flavoured and the spring roll was crispy and satisfying. What I didn't like about this dish, is the actual noodles. Instead of using the traditional Vietnamese thin vermicelli, they used the thick noodle-like kinds. I find the thick ones don't soak up the fish vinegar as well as the thin ones, so it ends up not being as flavourful. In addition to that, they didn't drain the noodles very well, so all the water just sat at the bottom of the bowl diluting the fish vinegar even more.

Pho add-ins

Special Pho -small

As you can probably see from the picture, the soup base was very very oily. I guess this is a personal preference, but I like my soup bases cleaner. The ingredients were not bad, but I found at this restaurant they give you significantly less noodles relative to the meat. I felt like I was eating meat in soup with a side of noodles rather than the contrary. Again, this point would probably be amazing to some people.

Overall the food was alright. One thing I didn't enjoy from here was definitely the service. There was a mix up with our pho, and it took them a while to realize what went wrong and for them to fix it. It was also very very busy. I felt like the servers were deliberately ignoring eye contact with us when we tried to get their attention. We had to wait like forever to get a teapot refill. Don't know if it's like this all the time, but definitely was not impressed.