Delicious food and good service overall! Cute little mom and pop shop - they’ve got little funko pop toys hanging all over the ceiling.Service was great - prompt, friendly. They also gave us soup (tomato and pork soup) as a start and a finishing dessert with the white snow fungus.I’d stick to the traditional Chinese dishes - the hainan chicken rice is a must order! So yummy and also boneless. The pea sprouts with garlic were also very fresh and a huge plate!The Hong Kong style baked spaghetti tastes good and satisfied the cravings but a little disappointing- not enough meat and the spaghetti was a little bit overcooked. Can skip this dish.Oh did I mention the tea was the best out of any restaurant! They had the most delicious lychee red tea - instead of the usual kinda cheap black teas that many other places have. I’d come just for the tea!Parking: You may have to circle around once since the lot can be quite full. Dinner time wasn’t too bad. Found a spot in a few minutes. Shares parking lot with grocery store so I can imagine lunch might be crazyKid-friendliness: Plenty of kid friendly options. Decor is definitely enticing for kids to see all the toys from the ceiling
Atmosphere: 4
Food: 4
Service: 5
Recommended dishes: Hainanese Chicken
Muriel T.
The shrimp with pumpkin fried with salted egg yolk was phenomenal, I was pleasantly surprised with how flavorful they were. Although I wished there were more shrimp and less pumpkin. The server barely spoke any English so you know its authentic Chinese place . They have a bunch of hanging action figures in the ceiling, pretty spacious and enough tables for the whole group. The server would smoke cigarettes in front of the restaurant which is the only reason I didn't give 5 stars.
Curtis L.
I hate to slam a small, family-owned restaurant, but this place was a little disappointing. The only reason to come here is for the hot steamer machines which lower down from the ceiling and steam the food at your table, providing a little show for you, but there are only seven tables at this restaurant and only two have steamers that work. If you don't get a table with a working steamer, you have to order food from the kitchen, and the food is okay, not great. They don't tell you which steamer is working or not as they're seating you, and that means if your steamer isn't working, you don't find out until after you've ordered.We came here for dim sum, and there are places that serve better dim sum (HL Peninsula and Ming Yuan Restaurant) and we also ordered the Hainan chicken, which was not only small, but we could make a better Hainan chicken than what we had here.
Wayne L.
Update. Pop Kitchen is a hip and refreshing place to eat. Not only healthy style of cooking, but for the Chinese food connoisseur you will not be disappointed. The chef is talented and cooks a variety of seafood, beef, and poultry dishes. I really like the seasoning and taste of the vegetables: crispy, fresh, and not oily. It's a fun place with parking and very good service. Yelp GradingThis is my rating system to help you gauge my ratingsAnything under three stars is not worth mentioning. Meh. *** stars - Good overall. Some aspects are above the notch: food, service, and or ambiance. Worthy of a visit. **** Stars - Exceptional, short of perfect. ***** Stars - Perfect in all aspects. Food quality, Service, Ambiance
xDizOn3AzNx
I went here with my parents and we order two items. Hianinan chicken and the other dish was pawns with walnut. The total pill came out to $50. The food was good. When we ask for the bill and payed the amount. The sever/host told us that we have to tip 15%. Eventually we did cash tip. As soon we were about to leave the server/host said that wasn’t enough tip money. First of all why you would ask for 15% tip. Second asking for tip and then complain about how we tipped low. You should be grateful there was tip. I never seen this kind behavior from any restaurant establishments. As a person that works in the restaurant industry that is a very rude thing to say to paying customers. Also on top of that I understand Cantonese so I understand all the unnecessary talk about didn’t tip enough and why you should tip more. As much I like the food here, more likely I won’t be coming back.
Atmosphere: 3
Food: 3
Service: 1
Wels M.
On our first visit to Pop Kitchen, my dad and I opted to get prepared items instead of the hot pot. We started off with dry-fried green beans with preserved vegetables which was scrumptious. Those bits of preserved vegetables gave the perfect salty/tart accent to the classic dish.Next arrived our order of salt and pepper squid. Don't expect the small, delicate tubes and tentacles with a thin batter that's barely crisp that one sees at other places. Pop's version is meaty but tender with a shatteringly crunchy coating and well-balanced seasoning...just a touch of heat from chopped jalapenos.Our third dish was a surprisingly delicious gamble...fish fillet with bitter melon. I wanted the version with pork spare ribs but dad is a seafood guy so we opted for the fish. The fish was a tad too tender for my taste but overall, the dish was a success. I love bitter melon so I primarily ate the veggies and left the fish for my dad.We rounded out the meal with my personal favorite...shrimp with eggs. It's homey and old-fashioned but I always ask for this wherever I go. It's how I gauge Cantonese restaurants and whether I would return for subsequent visits. The shrimp was perfectly cooked with that juicy snap that only experienced cooks are able to achieve. The scrambled eggs was soft and fluffy, almost layered and beautifully complimented the abundant large shrimp.Based on this visit, we will definitely be back. The owner/server was attentive and accommodating and the space was comfortable and welcoming.
Tiffany D
I waited almost an hour for these three dishes to be served ?? A total of four dishes were served by mistake. I guess those who come to his house order seafood will be served quickly??? I don’t understand why the tip is
Atmosphere: 1
Food: 3
Service: 1
Karen Z.
Went for steamed seafood but a lot of things are sold out (for lunch hours already??) or have to pre-order more than 24h before. The stuff we did order were prepared live so really fresh. Fried crab was also tasty.We ended up spending ~$60 per person so I'd say the store is actually $$$ if you go for steamed seafood. The menu items are quite expensive so not sure if it's worth it comparing to buying the same the same thing and steaming at home. There weren't a lot of people for weekend lunch hour, and while we were there, it seems like people in the kitchen are having a fight - a male and a female were yelling to each other very loudly in a dialect for ~30min, which strongly hurt our dinning experience.
Joanne C.
Ambiance: casualService: slow, have to ask multiple times Food: good This place has good seafood, but the food comes out pretty slow so keep that in mind! For the steamed seafood, they give you a soy sauce based dipping sauce! Besides seafood, they also have typical Chinese dishes like soup, fried appetizers, noodles, rice, and veggies. So there's quite a variety! SEAFOOD:geoduck- very good steamed giant clams $10 per clam which is pricey but tastyrazor clams- not the freshest, wouldn't get again DISHES:chicken trippe soup ($22)- if you like white pepper, you'll enjoy this soup HK pork chop ($14)- not enough flavor and cheese
cancelled my order as I parked in the lot. Waste of time and gas driving here if you are “close” just say so and don’t accept the order and cancel it as I
jugalmehand
Worst and too much worst experience. Cancel my order after 2 hour, when I order my food , accept order in one minute, and cancel after 2 hour, and I am waiting for my food and last cancel my food by restaurant
Eddie W.
Came with the family to eat dinner. The Hainan chicken was delicious, it was de-boned and came with 3 sauces. The jalapenos with intestine was very tasty and the black bean clam were nice and juicy. Recommended! Will be coming back
Loi L.
**BAD SERVICES ALERT** I hope this review will bring it to the attention of the owner. I never had such a horrible and dishonest service all these years dining out, that made me felt so disgusted at the quality of services from this one person working at this restaurant. Unprofessional, unethical, and this person clearly does not respect or give a crap about the businesses from the owner. Long story short, my aunt was visiting from Canada, so our family wanted to take her to a steam hot pot restaurant for the experience. Upon researching, It seems like there are three options to pick from the SF surrounding areas, so we picked Pop Kitchen, where we drove for 45 minutes from San Jose.We arrived at the restaurant at around 2 pm (01/18/23), there were only 2 occupied tables. The waitress wanted us to sit next to another occupied table but we wanted to sit at another table, hoping to social distancing from other guests, YET she insisted us to sit at the table she picked for us... and we did.After handed us the menu, we were ignored for a good 15 minutes. She was too busy doing her things and she argued very loud with one kitchen chef, in front of all the customers, so stupid and unprofessional. Finally, she came to our table to take order. We informed her that, we want steam hot pot and we want to order razor clams, live Seabass or live Rock Cod, unfortunately, none of the items is available and we got a great lecture on how the recent storm impacted the seafoods market. **Here's the juicy dishonest part,The waitress told us that the steam function on our table is broken and if we insisted on doing the steam hot pot, she would have to clean up the table right across from us, so we can move over for a working steam hot pot. We agreed and proceeded to order the alternative options; giant japanese clams, a live flownder for 38$ per pound which weights around 2.5 pounds. We also wanted the homemade fishball where the waitress advises us not to get it steam, instead, get it with the soup option (sound very sketchy, but whatever, we agreed).We also ordered a porkchop bake rice which comes with a soup, the soup when arrived, was room temperature, and had a borderline of spoiled taste. My dad flagged down the waitress simply to inform her about the soup, she couldn't careless, and quickly said "it's the taste of lotus root," then proceeded to walk away. We also asked her for the chilli sauce where she said ok, then completely ignored us. My dad had to walk up to her to ask for the chilli and get it himself.The table across from us was never cleaned, so that we can move over for the steam hot pot. The giant clams later came out as pre-steamed, we asked the waitress regarding that she said she would clean the tables across from us, so we can use the steam hotpot. She simply replied, "this method of cooking is way better than the steam hot pot, It's the same as the steam hot pot, the fish will be out soon." At this point, we all felted like we got scammed, and to be honest, we are here for the steam hot pot experience, if we wanted the traditional way of steam fish or seafoods, there are way better options in the surrounding area. Knowing I was at the tipping point of the situation, i was so disgusted about her attitudes, and unprofessional manner. I stopped eating and wanted just to leave as quickly as i can. When we asked for the bill, she got the audacity to ask for tips, just shameless... We tipped her 10 percent, hopefully amount gets splitted with kitchen staffs.It was the dining experience that we wanted to try out steam hot pot, and too bad we didn't get to try it. It was quite dissapointing for us to experience such horrendous services and it sucks for the owner to put his businesses on the linefor these unprofessional behaviors to slowly kill the business. I hope the owner put some serious efforts and considerations into reviewing this case for corrective actions. I truly hope, other customers would not have to experience similar incident as I did.I will not come back for sure, tha
Ilya Baykin
It's hard to explain just how wide-ranging the food selection is. There are steamers in the middle of every table for seafood. There are all kinds of deep fried appetizers, including chicken cartilage. All kinds of rice and noodles except the "traditional" Chinese-American fried rice and chow mein. The service is meh, but not terrible.Prices are weird - some things are obviously a better value than others.
Dietary restrictions: 絕對有香港鑊氣
Atmosphere: 4
Food: 5
Service: 4
Delicious food and good service overall! Cute little mom and pop shop - they’ve got little funko pop toys hanging all over the ceiling.Service was great - prompt, friendly. They also gave us soup (tomato and pork soup) as a start and a finishing dessert with the white snow fungus.I’d stick to the traditional Chinese dishes - the hainan chicken rice is a must order! So yummy and also boneless. The pea sprouts with garlic were also very fresh and a huge plate!The Hong Kong style baked spaghetti tastes good and satisfied the cravings but a little disappointing- not enough meat and the spaghetti was a little bit overcooked. Can skip this dish.Oh did I mention the tea was the best out of any restaurant! They had the most delicious lychee red tea - instead of the usual kinda cheap black teas that many other places have. I’d come just for the tea!Parking: You may have to circle around once since the lot can be quite full. Dinner time wasn’t too bad. Found a spot in a few minutes. Shares parking lot with grocery store so I can imagine lunch might be crazyKid-friendliness: Plenty of kid friendly options. Decor is definitely enticing for kids to see all the toys from the ceiling
Atmosphere: 4
Food: 4
Service: 5
Recommended dishes: Hainanese Chicken
The shrimp with pumpkin fried with salted egg yolk was phenomenal, I was pleasantly surprised with how flavorful they were. Although I wished there were more shrimp and less pumpkin. The server barely spoke any English so you know its authentic Chinese place . They have a bunch of hanging action figures in the ceiling, pretty spacious and enough tables for the whole group. The server would smoke cigarettes in front of the restaurant which is the only reason I didn't give 5 stars.
I hate to slam a small, family-owned restaurant, but this place was a little disappointing. The only reason to come here is for the hot steamer machines which lower down from the ceiling and steam the food at your table, providing a little show for you, but there are only seven tables at this restaurant and only two have steamers that work. If you don't get a table with a working steamer, you have to order food from the kitchen, and the food is okay, not great. They don't tell you which steamer is working or not as they're seating you, and that means if your steamer isn't working, you don't find out until after you've ordered.We came here for dim sum, and there are places that serve better dim sum (HL Peninsula and Ming Yuan Restaurant) and we also ordered the Hainan chicken, which was not only small, but we could make a better Hainan chicken than what we had here.
Update. Pop Kitchen is a hip and refreshing place to eat. Not only healthy style of cooking, but for the Chinese food connoisseur you will not be disappointed. The chef is talented and cooks a variety of seafood, beef, and poultry dishes. I really like the seasoning and taste of the vegetables: crispy, fresh, and not oily. It's a fun place with parking and very good service. Yelp GradingThis is my rating system to help you gauge my ratingsAnything under three stars is not worth mentioning. Meh. *** stars - Good overall. Some aspects are above the notch: food, service, and or ambiance. Worthy of a visit. **** Stars - Exceptional, short of perfect. ***** Stars - Perfect in all aspects. Food quality, Service, Ambiance
I went here with my parents and we order two items. Hianinan chicken and the other dish was pawns with walnut. The total pill came out to $50. The food was good. When we ask for the bill and payed the amount. The sever/host told us that we have to tip 15%. Eventually we did cash tip. As soon we were about to leave the server/host said that wasn’t enough tip money. First of all why you would ask for 15% tip. Second asking for tip and then complain about how we tipped low. You should be grateful there was tip. I never seen this kind behavior from any restaurant establishments. As a person that works in the restaurant industry that is a very rude thing to say to paying customers. Also on top of that I understand Cantonese so I understand all the unnecessary talk about didn’t tip enough and why you should tip more. As much I like the food here, more likely I won’t be coming back.
Atmosphere: 3
Food: 3
Service: 1
On our first visit to Pop Kitchen, my dad and I opted to get prepared items instead of the hot pot. We started off with dry-fried green beans with preserved vegetables which was scrumptious. Those bits of preserved vegetables gave the perfect salty/tart accent to the classic dish.Next arrived our order of salt and pepper squid. Don't expect the small, delicate tubes and tentacles with a thin batter that's barely crisp that one sees at other places. Pop's version is meaty but tender with a shatteringly crunchy coating and well-balanced seasoning...just a touch of heat from chopped jalapenos.Our third dish was a surprisingly delicious gamble...fish fillet with bitter melon. I wanted the version with pork spare ribs but dad is a seafood guy so we opted for the fish. The fish was a tad too tender for my taste but overall, the dish was a success. I love bitter melon so I primarily ate the veggies and left the fish for my dad.We rounded out the meal with my personal favorite...shrimp with eggs. It's homey and old-fashioned but I always ask for this wherever I go. It's how I gauge Cantonese restaurants and whether I would return for subsequent visits. The shrimp was perfectly cooked with that juicy snap that only experienced cooks are able to achieve. The scrambled eggs was soft and fluffy, almost layered and beautifully complimented the abundant large shrimp.Based on this visit, we will definitely be back. The owner/server was attentive and accommodating and the space was comfortable and welcoming.
I waited almost an hour for these three dishes to be served ?? A total of four dishes were served by mistake. I guess those who come to his house order seafood will be served quickly??? I don’t understand why the tip is
Atmosphere: 1
Food: 3
Service: 1
Went for steamed seafood but a lot of things are sold out (for lunch hours already??) or have to pre-order more than 24h before. The stuff we did order were prepared live so really fresh. Fried crab was also tasty.We ended up spending ~$60 per person so I'd say the store is actually $$$ if you go for steamed seafood. The menu items are quite expensive so not sure if it's worth it comparing to buying the same the same thing and steaming at home. There weren't a lot of people for weekend lunch hour, and while we were there, it seems like people in the kitchen are having a fight - a male and a female were yelling to each other very loudly in a dialect for ~30min, which strongly hurt our dinning experience.
Ambiance: casualService: slow, have to ask multiple times Food: good This place has good seafood, but the food comes out pretty slow so keep that in mind! For the steamed seafood, they give you a soy sauce based dipping sauce! Besides seafood, they also have typical Chinese dishes like soup, fried appetizers, noodles, rice, and veggies. So there's quite a variety! SEAFOOD:geoduck- very good steamed giant clams $10 per clam which is pricey but tastyrazor clams- not the freshest, wouldn't get again DISHES:chicken trippe soup ($22)- if you like white pepper, you'll enjoy this soup HK pork chop ($14)- not enough flavor and cheese
Restaurantji Recommends
cancelled my order as I parked in the lot. Waste of time and gas driving here if you are “close” just say so and don’t accept the order and cancel it as I
Worst and too much worst experience. Cancel my order after 2 hour, when I order my food , accept order in one minute, and cancel after 2 hour, and I am waiting for my food and last cancel my food by restaurant
Came with the family to eat dinner. The Hainan chicken was delicious, it was de-boned and came with 3 sauces. The jalapenos with intestine was very tasty and the black bean clam were nice and juicy. Recommended! Will be coming back
**BAD SERVICES ALERT** I hope this review will bring it to the attention of the owner. I never had such a horrible and dishonest service all these years dining out, that made me felt so disgusted at the quality of services from this one person working at this restaurant. Unprofessional, unethical, and this person clearly does not respect or give a crap about the businesses from the owner. Long story short, my aunt was visiting from Canada, so our family wanted to take her to a steam hot pot restaurant for the experience. Upon researching, It seems like there are three options to pick from the SF surrounding areas, so we picked Pop Kitchen, where we drove for 45 minutes from San Jose.We arrived at the restaurant at around 2 pm (01/18/23), there were only 2 occupied tables. The waitress wanted us to sit next to another occupied table but we wanted to sit at another table, hoping to social distancing from other guests, YET she insisted us to sit at the table she picked for us... and we did.After handed us the menu, we were ignored for a good 15 minutes. She was too busy doing her things and she argued very loud with one kitchen chef, in front of all the customers, so stupid and unprofessional. Finally, she came to our table to take order. We informed her that, we want steam hot pot and we want to order razor clams, live Seabass or live Rock Cod, unfortunately, none of the items is available and we got a great lecture on how the recent storm impacted the seafoods market. **Here's the juicy dishonest part,The waitress told us that the steam function on our table is broken and if we insisted on doing the steam hot pot, she would have to clean up the table right across from us, so we can move over for a working steam hot pot. We agreed and proceeded to order the alternative options; giant japanese clams, a live flownder for 38$ per pound which weights around 2.5 pounds. We also wanted the homemade fishball where the waitress advises us not to get it steam, instead, get it with the soup option (sound very sketchy, but whatever, we agreed).We also ordered a porkchop bake rice which comes with a soup, the soup when arrived, was room temperature, and had a borderline of spoiled taste. My dad flagged down the waitress simply to inform her about the soup, she couldn't careless, and quickly said "it's the taste of lotus root," then proceeded to walk away. We also asked her for the chilli sauce where she said ok, then completely ignored us. My dad had to walk up to her to ask for the chilli and get it himself.The table across from us was never cleaned, so that we can move over for the steam hot pot. The giant clams later came out as pre-steamed, we asked the waitress regarding that she said she would clean the tables across from us, so we can use the steam hotpot. She simply replied, "this method of cooking is way better than the steam hot pot, It's the same as the steam hot pot, the fish will be out soon." At this point, we all felted like we got scammed, and to be honest, we are here for the steam hot pot experience, if we wanted the traditional way of steam fish or seafoods, there are way better options in the surrounding area. Knowing I was at the tipping point of the situation, i was so disgusted about her attitudes, and unprofessional manner. I stopped eating and wanted just to leave as quickly as i can. When we asked for the bill, she got the audacity to ask for tips, just shameless... We tipped her 10 percent, hopefully amount gets splitted with kitchen staffs.It was the dining experience that we wanted to try out steam hot pot, and too bad we didn't get to try it. It was quite dissapointing for us to experience such horrendous services and it sucks for the owner to put his businesses on the linefor these unprofessional behaviors to slowly kill the business. I hope the owner put some serious efforts and considerations into reviewing this case for corrective actions. I truly hope, other customers would not have to experience similar incident as I did.I will not come back for sure, tha
It's hard to explain just how wide-ranging the food selection is. There are steamers in the middle of every table for seafood. There are all kinds of deep fried appetizers, including chicken cartilage. All kinds of rice and noodles except the "traditional" Chinese-American fried rice and chow mein. The service is meh, but not terrible.Prices are weird - some things are obviously a better value than others.
Atmosphere: 3
Food: 4
Service: 3