VIETNAMESE IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD

We haven't found a truly great Vietnamese restaurant around us. There are some pretty good ones - we sometimes visit the one in the Pacific East Mall for pho, but nothing that has been truly amazing. While driving over to kickboxing a couple of times, I had noticed a pho restaurant called Pho Hoa in a strip mall in Richmond - the neighborhood north of us. It's not really the safest neighborhood, nor one that we visit often, but the restaurant we saw always seemed like it was packed with Asians. So one evening we finally decided to check it out.

We decided to go to dinner early, since I was being a little paranoid and wanted to eat while it was still light out. This meant that we were basically the first people to show up at the restaurant (though we were quickly followed by a few other people). Since this was our first time visiting the restaurant, I decided to get a few simple things.

The first thing we started off with were fish cakes.
There were okay. They weren't my favorite fishcakes that I'd ever had, since they weren't crispy and had a more oily flavor. Maybe because we arrived there early, the oil still hadn't heated up fully. (when you fry at a lower temperature, whatever you're frying will absorb more oil and end up soggy rather than crispy).

Then a order my usual - a bowl of chicken pho.
It was actually a very good bowl of pho. And the side additions it came with were very fresh and tasty. I must say, that's it was probably the best bowl of pho that I've had in the East Bay. However, I must warn that the service here is high lacking, and they aren't exactly nice. I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to visit this restaurant again. Though it was good, it wasn't truly amazing enough for me to go there rather than the Pacific East Mall. So I'll continue looking for some really great Vietnamese here in the East Bay.