I Am Pho - Chinatown, Manchester, England.

There has not been much new as far as east Asian food is concerned in the restaurants of Manchester over the last few years. However, here is one… I am Pho is the name of the first ever Pho (Vietnamese Beef Soup Noodles) restaurant in Manchester. There has always been a large Vietnamese community in Manchester, and I have always wondered why a place like this has not sprung up sooner.

Anyway, I have decided to give this place a try last month. It was located in Chinatown, next to the strip club, so if you go in the evenings, don’t let the sight of the burly bouncers put you off.

One word of warning … do not park your car outside the strip club. The bouncers will lean and sit on it. Because they look big and mean, they know no one will tell them off and they don’t care that they annoy the car owners.

Once in the restaurant you will notice that the layout was more like a café than a restaurant, but that is fine, because it felt clean and comfortable. However, the prices were not café prices. You could go to most Chinatown restaurants and order most noodle dishes at around the same price… about the £7.50 mark.

On the table is a range of good quality sauces and dips.

Of course, I ordered the signature dish, beef pho -  with the beef rare, so that it is cooked in the soup. There were other dishes on the menu but 80% of them were a variation of the pho soup noodles, with a few rice dishes and the customary Vietnamese summer / spring rolls as sides.

The verdict:

The soup was light … very light. It tasted refreshing but lacked flavour, as if it was a little bit too diluted or not enough beef was used in the stock.

The noodles were fresh as opposed to the dry / reconstituted type, which is better than the only other Pho in tried in Manchester, in a café in Ancoats.

The beef were sliced thicker than I would have liked it, making it slightly tough. They (the beef) somehow tasted rather detached from the soup .. hard to explain, but you know the taste you get when you feel that the ingredients do not belong to the dish because the taste is too different? Maybe this is because of the lack of beefy taste in the soup.

The portion was generous and adequate for most hungry diners. I would return if I needed another pho fix, but not too often as I do not think this is good value. I think under £5 would have been a fair price for this dish which does not consist of any expensive ingredients. 

Yook Woo Hin - Another visit - KL Chinatown

We visited this place back in Oct 2008, but on last year's visit, we had to go again as we realised that we did not know about one of their signature dishes then.

Located at No. 100, Jalan Petaling, this place was a bit busier than our last visit. It was about 12 noon and there were quite a few diners in there, most ordering either Singapore Meehoon, or beef ho fun, as pictured below.



What an amazing dish this was! Noodles were fresh this time and the beef was literally melt in your mouth in terms of texture, and yet retained its succulency. The sauce was also very tasty. I would recommend this tp anyone visiting this place!

We also had a dish of their char siu, which they are also renowned for. This tasted better than our last visit as it was fresher and juicier and the meat had just the right combination of fatty and lean bits within.



The filler dish was this rather bland looking plate of fried rice but it tasted much better than it looked! Maybe it was the msg, but we left this place quite satisfied, if not a bit puzzled as to how this lot somehow came to around rm30.

Canton-i Restaurant @ 1-Utama, Petaling Jaya

Back home in Manchester now. However, there is still plenty for me to write about regarding my culinary exploits in KL / PJ during my visit. The last few days since I have been back has been rather dull, as far as eating is concerned. But this always happen after every visit to Malaysia. After a couple of week of extreme stimulations of the tastebuds, all the food here seems rather bland and unexciting. Even when I went to a nice restaurant yesterday, it failed to recreate the buzz and high of tasting Malaysian food in Malaysia itself.


Here is place I have read about in many blogs and have had it on my list as a must-visit when I visited Malaysia next, so here I was.

The front was very modern, clean and had a rather upmarket look to it, despite having the image of selling popular Hong Kong hawker / cafe food. It was around 12pm on a Saturday and there were already loads of people going into the restaurant. I would have liked to have lunched a little later but seeing the crowd, we thought we'd better grab a table there before they were full up.



Here we can see the cooks doing their stuff in a kitchen exposed for all to see. No spitting into the food here! So, you can safely return the food if you dont like it!


The char siu wantan noodle dish was very nice. The char siu was tender and fresh with just enough charring to avoid the bitter taste. This was definitely Malaysian style char siu rather than the red and blander Hong Kong style. The wantans were huge.. like siu mai, and plenty of juicy prawns and pork filling within. The noodle was nice too, but not outstanding. The sauce, however, was just ok. Not as good as an old fashioned Malaysian style wantan mee sauce from a hawker.


The ngau nam meen (beef brisket noodle) is as good as any I have ever tasted. Neither better nor worse. I dont think anything ordering this would be disappointed, but neither would they be wowed.


I ordered an indivudual plate of crispy roast pork (siew yoke) and roast cuttlefish, after reading good reviews about the former. I was not disappointed with the former, as the skin was really crispy and meat was juicy and tender. However, the cuttlefish was really tough. I have had much better in the UK. I have not seen this kind of cuttlefish being sold fresh in the local markets here, so maybe the quality of the raw cuttlefish was not so good.



My overall impression was that it was just ok, especially given the price of around rm80 for all the above dishes. Ok, so its still about half the price I would have to pay in the UK in an average Chinese restaurant. However, I expected it to have cost a lot less in South East Asia, even if the quality was above average.

Some of the other blogs that made me visit this place:

Babe in the city
Masak Masak
Ling239