B K's Bistro — Restaurant in Fremont

The location of this restaurant is interesting as your access to it is from a street that looks residential on the left and then industrial parkway on the right. Nestled inside of what looks like business offices is this Hong Kong style Chinese restaurant/ dim sum eatery where you get a combination of Hong Kong Cafe and dumplings as your choice of meals and eats. This place is medium sized on the inside but is very family and home feeling but on the rather narrow and tight side in terms of space and table positions with options to eat outside on the patio. It is not a polished environment but more of an open format. Something like what you might see in San Francisco's Chinatown restaurants so expect to be eating right out where you can see the servers and the cooks and the waiters doing the work of what may traditionally be behind a counter or hidden behind the kitchen wall. This is not a problem as I've often believed that the food speaks for itself and that the presentation is something that can be just part of the background as long as it does not interfere with your eating experience. Unfortunately on today's visit there was a bit of a shouting match going on between what appeared to be the manager and a customer who ordered food online and still had not received his food after 40 minutes. The manager seemed to have started the shouting match in the middle of our meal about 2 tables away and she seemed to lack empathy for the customer. Our friend had indicated that ordering food online from this place was spotty and that her experience was says you're better off phoning the order in and avoiding the online experience all together.

Now a note on the food itself. This dim sum is your classic selection of dishes but not the classic dim sum experience, meaning they don't push the carts around for you to see what's available. Rather like many other dim sum restaurants now you choose from a list. Check off what you want to order and they prepare it and bring it out. The food was made quickly and came out fast and was a typical dim sum flavor. But I did not find it to be notable and rather common in terms of taste and experience. This is not bad, it just was average. With that said, I don't think you would be disappointed, and if you're hankering for dim sum, you can satisfy your craving here. If you're like me and you grew up with Asian restaurants that are not polished and refined and are okay with the possible market type service drama, this is a rather cozy place without much of the fancy trimmings. I do recommend it if you just want to satisfy a classic Chinese food palette.

Pro tip: they do not serve you water by default or they simply didn't on this day. If you want water make sure you ask for it all around because they will bring you just that single one cup of water. This was the case for our table of 11. Water for everyone isn't a given or even a consideration and if anybody else wants water you better...

Really good dim sum spot! Their dim sum isn't too salty and oily - it's flavorful and delicious. It wasn't exactly the best but Fremont area, it's pretty darn good. We got here around 11AM on Sunday and the place was packed but we were able to get a table for 4 immediately. As soon as we seated almost all the tables were filled up, so I advise to grab tables before 11AM on weekend, or you'll be waiting in line. We saw tons of people waiting outside. The place is not the biggest restaurant, so they packed all the tables together. We saw next to another group and it was very close. Our tables were almost touch each other. They have to make do with what little space they have. Service isn't exactly the best, they are extremely busy with only 3 workers trying to keep up with all the tables. We asked for water and napkins and they forgot, nobody brought it to us. So we just grabbed our own items at the front, including to-go boxes.

You place an order via paper form and mark what you want. We ordered a bit too much for 4 people : 2 siu mais, 2 har gaw, 1fried shrimp ball, 2 orders of sticky rice in leaves, chicken feet, beef chow fun, 2 rice rolls, pork spare ribs, taro buns, and forgot what else. We had plenty as leftover. I would have just ordered 1 of each instead of multiple of each item. There's so much to try! Total came out to less than $120 for 4 people, for foods enough for 6. Pretty standard pricing for the bay area. The siu mai was good, not salty. The rice rolls tasted fresh and the rice roll part weren't soggy - it held up the meat inside. So good. The taro buns were OK - tasted like frozen. I would not order this next time. The sticky rice in leaves were flavorless, you can skip this dish as well. Har gaw was good, definitely get this. Pork spare ribs were super oily and they clumped together, wondering if they just heated it up instead of cooking fresh. Overall not bad and would recommend coming here when it's less crowded. The bathrooms were gross, they need to...

I ordered dim sum here for Father's Day via their website. The ordering system was fairly straightforward albeit a bit clunky. I do wish that the descriptions included the number of servings per dim sum entree. I found myself having to refer to Yelp to look at the entree pictures. I also never got an email confirmation or any order updates after placing my order and just went to pick up my order based on the website's pre-written ETA of 30-40 minutes. I ended up just taking a screenshot of the order confirmation on the website on my phone.

When I arrived at the restaurant 40 minutes later, I was asked to provide the last 4 digits of my phone # instead of the order confirmation number. I was then informed that my order wasn't ready and that it would take at least another 30 minutes. They were overwhelmed with their takeout orders, which led to customers having to wait at least 2x longer than expected. During the wait, I observed grumpy patrons arguing with the lady at the cash register. She was at least offering a refund if customers no longer wanted to wait for their delayed orders.

I finally received my order ~1.5 hours after placing it. I was happy to find that the food was fresh and pretty tasty. There was also no discrepency in my order, despite the chaos that ensued. The restaurant gets 3 stars for that.

BK Bistro definitely needs to figure out how to triage their online orders more effectively. However, COVID and the influx of orders on Father's Day probably did make things a bit more difficult. I hope that the staff is able to streamline these issues, especially since BK's Bistro is a fairly popular dim sum place in Fremont. Since Google Reviews doesn't do partial ratings and I'm feeling quite generous at the moment, I will round up my final review from 3.5...