Pho Mono is a spacious, clean restaurant that's located conveniently in a long stretch of Ajax outlet stores. Since it would be a shorter drive than to Pho Metro, we decided to give it a try, hoping that it would be good enough to be our go to Pho spot in Durham region.
We each ordered an extra large house special Pho and a large satay beef Pho only because they don't offer a medium size. We had a good chuckle thinking about why a restaurant would have a small, large and an extra large sizes instead of just simply having a small, medium and large. Doesn't seem to make much sense to skip a medium and call it a large and their large, an extra large. Anyways, I digress.
The noodles arrived fairly quickly and they were the broader and less chewy variety that I don't particularly enjoy. My husbands extra large house special pho had some meatballs (upon partaking later, they were overcooked and chewy) and some cooked rare beef (which were also pretty tough). Not the best cuts of meat were used and the meat portion was on a small side. The broth was the standard out of package msg stuff that tasted like most pho broth.
My satay beef pho was the strangest version of the dish I had ever encountered at a pho restaurant. The soup was thick and gooey from the large chunks of beef that had been coated in corn starch before being wok fried and added to the soup. There was not enough satay sauce to really taste the satay but the gooey and goopy consistency of the broth was the most off putting thing about the noodle soup. Overall, the noodle soup didn't taste bad, just poorly executed.
I'm not sure if we would go back to pho mono or just choose to do the extra 10 min drive up to Pho Metro. The jury is still out.