March 30, 2021: Pho Quinn Authentic Vietnamese Cuisine is one of my favourite Vietnamese restaurants. Their menu is reasonably priced with lots of assorted items to choose from like the butter fried chicken wings, broken rice, vermicelli, and delicious vegetarian pho (you can view my previous blog post about my dine-in experience here). They are located on the corner of Highway 7 and McCowan in Markham with plenty of parking space in front of and behind the restaurant. It’s hard to miss them since they are right at the corner of a busy intersection.

We ordered a number of items for dinner: Two types of vermicelli (one with grilled pork and spring rolls; one with minced shrimp sugar cane, pork sausage, and spring rolls), Beef Pad Thai, chef’s special beef rice noodle soup (large), shrimp rolls, avocado milkshake, and a three colour dessert. I haven’t had the three colour dessert in many years and was excited to try it out again.

I loved that the vermicelli and spring roll dishes were packed in environmentally friendly paper containers! I love that because I can just rip up the container and place it into the compost bin. The other items were contained in plastic containers.

I am a big fan of sweet and sour items lately, so the Beef Pad Thai really hit the spot. There weren’t as many beef pieces with the rice noodles as I would have liked but I thought this dish was still very tasty.

The shrimp rolls were packaged in cling wrap and not pre-cut. Once I cut them up though, the mint really wavered through the air and was so fragrant. These spring rolls fell apart a little bit so I think that’s why they wrapped up them (other restaurants don’t usually wrap them like this).

The two vermicelli dishes were befitted with some salad on the side. Both dishes contained less vermicelli than expected. I know that when we dined in and ordered this dish, they gave us a lot more vermicelli. It was almost like a bottomless pit. Here in the takeout order though, the vermicelli was lacking a little bit. The toppings were tasty though. The pork sausage, grilled pork, sugar cane shrimp were all quite good. The spring roll could have been more crispy but considering it sat in a takeout box for about 30 minutes before being eaten, it’s understandable that the crispiness wouldn’t have lasted.

For the chef’s special beef noodle soup, they placed the raw beef slices on top of the noodles and other assorted beef items. This ensured that the raw beef stayed raw. In their online instructions for pho, they recommended heating up and boiling the soup first so that it would be hot. We did do this. We should have followed through with the instructions and dipped the rice noodles into the hot soup too. The rice noodles were a tad al dente. After eating this meal, I felt a bit thirsty. My guess is that it was from the MSG from the pho soup base. I really liked the raw beef though. They were so silky smooth.

The avocado milkshake was great. I haven’t had this in probably more than a decade and forgot how smooth and creamy these are.

The three colour dessert was great too. It had ice cream, pandan jelly, and red bean. It was a great sweet ending to this meal.

Overall, it was a satisfying Vietnamese meal at home. The Beef Pad Thai was a new dish I hadn’t ordered before from Pho Quinn and it was great. If only the vermicelli dishes were of bigger portion, it would have been even nicer.

I usually upload the photos of each dish onto my blog posts but now with limited time for blogging (as a new mom), this will do for now. 🙂