Chef Simon's Kitchen

One kitchen in downtown Orillia turns out Vietnamese pho, Thai curries, and Chinese-style General Tao chicken, and puts a single name behind all three: Chef Simon Chau. That range is the whole idea at Chef Simon's Kitchen, a casual restaurant on Memorial Avenue where the menu reads less like one national cuisine than a working cook's command of several. It is built for the everyday decision — lunch, a weeknight dinner, a takeout order grabbed on the way home — and the breadth is what lets a table that can't agree on Thai or Vietnamese settle the argument in a single order. Simon Chau opened the place in 2017, and the format has stayed deliberately practical ever since.

The noodle soups are the clearest first order. Beef noodle soup arrives pho-style, a rice-noodle bowl built for comfort; satay beef noodle soup runs richer and more aromatic; and the spicy vermicelli beef soup follows the Hue style, carrying its own heat and a firmer noodle. Shrimp wonton egg noodle soup and a plain chicken noodle soup round out the section. From there the menu widens fast. Pad Thai comes three ways — the standard plate, a bolder Bangkok street-style version, and a red-curry Curry Pad Thai — beside Pad See-Ew in dark soy and Chiang Mai noodles cut with sweet basil and fresh chili. The Vietnamese banh mi run from pork belly to lemongrass chicken to a tofu build; the vermicelli bowls come topped with a spring roll and pickled carrot; and Thai basil fried rice folds in pineapple and egg. Peanut sauce chicken and General Tao chicken cover the saucier, less noodle-led end. To drink, Vietnamese iced coffee and Thai iced tea hold the line the food sets.

What the menu says is that the kitchen refuses to specialize, and does it on purpose. Three cooking traditions share one line, and rather than blur into a generic pan-Asian sameness, each keeps its markers — the tamarind and palm sugar of a proper Pad Thai, the clean aromatic broth of a Vietnamese soup, the sweet-savoury lacquer of General Tao chicken. That a small casual kitchen runs five distinct noodle soups — pho, satay beef, Hue-style spicy vermicelli, shrimp wonton, chicken — says something on its own: soups are the section a cook builds out when the broth matters. The pricing sits low and the portions run to full bowls and rice plates. Vegetarians get more than a token path through it, from veggie Thai spring rolls to tofu vermicelli bowls and curries built on tofu and vegetables.

Simon Chau's name is not decoration. A local video feature years ago followed him through the kitchen plating a grass noodle salad, a shrimp Pad Thai, and pineapple fried rice, and described a cook equally at home in Thai, Chinese, and Vietnamese technique — the same fluency the current menu runs on. Local reporting at the time made a point of how his plates looked as good as they tasted, a detail that lands when the food arrives. The everyday menu still carries lemongrass fried chicken, cheese wontons, and beef with broccoli alongside the soups, the spread of a cook who kept adding rather than paring down.

The operating model matches the food. Takeout, pick-up, and delivery sit alongside the dining room, and the strongest orders — a soup, a Pad Thai, a few spring rolls — travel as well as they sit down. The doors open six days a week and close on Tuesdays, the rhythm of a place folded into a normal week rather than saved for an occasion. On Memorial Avenue, that is what Chef Simon's Kitchen has settled into being: the answer to the weeknight question, from a cook who can give it in three languages.