Pho Huynh Hiep (Kevin Noodle House) - San Francisco

I chose this restaurant after yelping it. Me and hubby went to one pho restaurant in that area quite a while ago. Hubby loving the noodle and kept on saying that we should go back. A month ago we happened to be in the area again taking some out of town tourists. But to our amazement, we couldn't find the restaurant! When I yelped it, this is the restaurant that serves horfun (wide noodle) with their pho. And yelp didn't say anything about any restaurant being closed.

This restaurant was actually bigger than that restaurant that we went to before almost twice the size. I ordered the seafood pho and I insisted hubby ordered the beef pho to see whether this was the restaurant. Another thing that made me wonder was this restaurant actually serves seafood pho while the restaurant that we were looking for didn't. Hmm..

But anyhow, I pushed all those aside and decided to give them a try. We also ordered the fresh spring roll. It came out within minutes. There were three rolls on the plate cut into two each roll that yielded six pieces. Hubby complained about them being smaller than the usual spring roll we had. But I actually like it that way. It's more bite size. Dipped it into the sweet thick brown sauce and they disappeared quickly in the mouth without having the filling scattered on your table or your plate.

Hubby's combo beef pho came in a huge bowl. Broth has deeper color almost brown and more oily than what we usually had. But then he ordered the combo with steak, tripe, tendon, flank - almost the whole kitchen sink. I noticed when I ordered the combo, the broth will usually be more oily. That's too bad because I do like those 'weird's stuff but not the oily broth. Another thing that we also noticed was the star anise flavor that was pretty thick with the soup. All in all, hubby liked his soup and had no complain even though he diverted all his tripe, etc to my bowl.

I couldn't say the same with my seafood pho. The soup was bland. I tried to put in more sriracha to give it a flavor. But it's just NOT there. Seafood consisted of two decent size prawns, a few decent size squid, one big piece of fish cake and three to four big pieces of imitation crab. I don't like too much imitation crab in my seafood pho. Don't they understand, it's IMITATION crab so it's not seafood. Imitation crab should be limited to just two small pieces or left out.

One good thing that I should pointed out. The bean sprout was actually blanched so it didn't bring down the temperature of the broth. You notice sometimes you put in the bean sprout and the bean sprout don't even get cooked because the broth wasn't hot enough to even cook the sprout. But yesterday with the temperatures sin the low 90s, the soup just didn't get cooler even after we were almost done. ha..ha..

Pho Huynh Hiep 2 (Kevin Noodle House)
1833 Irving St
San Francisco, CA 94122
(415)664-0469

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