Pho Metro

A few days ago, a few of us realized that we hadn't had pho for quite some time.  Sometimes on a very hot summer day, it's difficult to go from the hot outdoors to the indoors to eat more hot food, but as the summer is slowly coming to an end and the nights were getting cooler, we decided having pho might not have been such a good idea.  Since I was in the Markham area which is in the north end of Toronto, we decided to venture out to Pho Metro.  It is located in a small strip mall surrounded by a residential homes and farmer's fields.

When we got in, the waitress was nice enough to reset the room so that we could have a corner seat in the back.  She said it would be better since we had a stroller and it might get in the way of other patrons if we were given a seat in the front of the room.

Scanning their massive menu, they had all the phos or rice noodles one wanted and a lot of rice dishes and appetizer dishes as well.  For yours truly, I always like some simple so I just went with their small Pho Dac Biet ($6,.45) which consisted of  rare beef, beef balls, beef flank and beef tripe.

All of our bowls arrived roughly the same time.  I had a taste of the soup base first and I can tell you it was spot on.  As I rummaged through the rice noodles, I noticed that there wasn't much rice noodles in the small bowl.  I realize that it was a small bowl that I had ordered but this was certainly smaller in terms of quantity compared to some of the other places that I have eaten.  Puzzled, I actually started counting what I actually in my bowl.  There were about 2 pieces of tripe, 2 pieces of flank, 1 tiny meatball and 4 slices of rare beef. The meatball cracked me up the most. There was only one, yes one, and it was the size of a medium size cherry.  No joke.  I showed everybody at the table and everyone had a pretty good chuckle over it. When I ordered a small noodle, they weren't kidding when it came out small.  Looking around the table, I could see that there medium size noodles were probably closer to the smaller bowls from their competitors.

Taste wise, the noodles were not bad at all.  With a little bit of hot sauce and hoisin sauce, the noodles actually tasted very good and as mentioned before, a solid soup base really helped matters.  Overall, it was bittersweet in the end.  Somewhat satisfied in that the noodles in that it tasted great however a little disappointed with the proportion size of the meal.  A snack or two was needed back home to keep the stomach happy.  At $6.45, they were also probably on the slightly higher end by about 50 cents for a small bowl of pho.  If there were just a few more noodles, more ingredients and slightly larger size meatballs, then higher marks surely would have been given.  But for now, I give it a 3 out of 5.

Pho Metro
50 Bur Oak Avenue Unit 7
Markham, Ontario

905-888-6999