I Am Not Vegan. So Why Can I Not Stop Eating at The Kind Bowl?

Here is something that does not get talked about enough. Walk into The Kind Bowl at Northpoint City on any given Tuesday afternoon. Look around the room. Look at who is eating  the office workers hunched over steaming bowls, the families sharing summer rolls, the solo diners scrolling their phones with one hand and lifting chopsticks with the other.

Most of them eat meat.

Not some of them. Not a few curious visitors who wandered in by mistake. According to Hannah Nguyen, the founder of The Kind Bowl, seventy percent of her customers are meat-eaters. They come not because they are vegan, not because they are on a plant-based journey, and not because someone pressured them into trying something ethical. They come because the food is genuinely, undeniably good.

That single number  seventy percent  is the most honest thing anyone has ever said about what The Kind Bowl actually is. It is not a vegan restaurant that tolerates non-vegans. It is a Vietnamese restaurant that happens to serve no animal products. And for the majority of people sitting in it at any given moment, that distinction barely registers. They ordered because they were hungry. They finished because it was outstanding. They came back because they could not stop thinking about the broth.

This piece is for every person who has ever walked past The Kind Bowl, clocked the word "vegan" somewhere on the signage, and thought  that's not for me. It is for the meat-eaters, the flexitarians, the dairy devotees, and the committed carnivores who have never once considered that their next favourite restaurant in Singapore might not serve a single piece of meat. It is, specifically, about why that assumption is wrong.

The Broth. That Is Where This Story Starts.

In Vietnamese cooking, the broth is not a supporting character. It is the whole point. Every great Vietnamese pho begins and ends with the broth  and not just any broth. Not a stock cube dissolved in hot water. Not a twenty-minute simmer that extracts surface flavour and calls it done. A real pho broth is built over hours, sometimes most of a day, from a combination of ingredients that is less a recipe and more a philosophy.

At The Kind Bowl, the pho broth takes three hours to cook. Every single day. It is built from ten different fruits and vegetables, slow-simmered with charred ginger, charred onion, star anise, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, coriander seeds, and lemongrass, the same spice profile that defines great Vietnamese pho anywhere in the world. There are no shortcuts. Hannah Nguyen does not believe in them.

"Pho is one of the most complicated dishes to make," she has said. "A good pho is all about the right balance of the spices, herbs and aroma. There are no shortcuts in cooking pho. We make our pho in a traditional manner by slow cooking." The result of that daily three-hour process is a broth that stops people mid-bite. Not because it surprises them with some clever plant-based trick. Because it tastes like pho. Deeply, authentically, unmistakably pho  the kind that makes you lean forward over the bowl and breathe in before you even pick up the chopsticks. This is what seventy percent of meat-eating customers are responding to. Not a vegan ideology. A bowl of extraordinarily well-made soup.

What Actually Happens When You Try It

The first time most people try The Kind Bowl's Kind Pho, there is a moment of uncertainty right before the first spoonful. They know it is vegan. They have been told there is no chicken, no beef bones, no fish sauce anywhere near it. And somewhere in the back of their mind, the quiet suspicion that it might taste like absence, like a dish defined by what is missing rather than what is present. That suspicion lasts until the first mouthful of broth.

Then it evaporates.

What arrives in that first spoonful is warmth  not just temperature, but the specific kind of warmth that only a properly simmered, properly spiced broth produces. The star anise comes through first, that slight sweetness, that faint liquorice edge that Vietnamese pho is built on. Then the depth arrives underneath the mushroom umami, the earthiness from the vegetables, the gentle sweetness that ten different fruits and vegetables slow-cooked together eventually give up into the liquid.

Over silky flat rice noodles, not the springy vermicelli of other noodle dishes, but the wide, flat, slightly chewy rice noodles that pho specifically requires, the broth carries marinated seitan. This is where non-vegans often expect things to fall apart. It does not fall apart. The seitan, marinated in traditional Vietnamese flavour profiles, absorbs rather than mimics. It does not pretend to be chicken. It simply tastes, in the context of this broth, exactly right.

Grilled oyster mushrooms add a sweetness and slight char that lifts the bowl further. Fresh bean sprouts, still crunchy, add texture. A handful of Vietnamese herbs  mint, coriander, perilla  add the brightness that prevents rich food from becoming heavy. A wedge of lime, squeezed over everything just before eating, pulls it all together.

Vietnamese residents, arguably the hardest people in the world to convince that plant-based pho is legitimate, have tried the Kind Pho and called it one of the best pho they have ever eaten. Not the best vegan pho. The best pho. That is the benchmark The Kind Bowl is working to.

Why Vietnamese Food Works So Well Without Meat

This is the question underneath everything, the one that explains why The Kind Bowl exists and why it works. Vietnamese cuisine was never built around meat the way many Western food traditions were. The backbone of Vietnamese cooking has always been the broth, the herbs, the spices, the fermented and pickled elements, the fresh vegetables, the rice noodles. Meat was present, yes  but it was never the architecture. It was decorated on top of a structure that was fundamentally plant-based.

Remove the decoration, and the structure remains.

This is why a slow-simmered vegetable broth, built with the same spices and the same patience and the same charred aromatics as a traditional meat-based pho, produces something that tastes complete. Because it was always the spices and the process that made it taste like pho. The meat was incidental. The Kind Bowl's kitchen understands this completely. Every technique uses  the charring of aromatics before they go into the pot, the toasting of whole spices, the slow extraction of natural sweetness from fruit and vegetable, the balance of sour, sweet, salty, and spicy that defines Vietnamese flavour  is traditional Vietnamese cooking. The only thing that changed is the protein source.

And most people cannot tell.

That is not a marketing line. It is what seventy percent of The Kind Bowl's customers demonstrate every single day simply by returning.

The Dishes That Convert Meat Eaters  One by One

The Kind Pho is the entry point. But The Kind Bowl's menu is broader than one dish, and every item on it is doing the same work  delivering genuine Vietnamese flavour through entirely plant-based means.

The Crazy Baguette  Bánh Mì That Earns Its Name

Ranked the #11 best vegan dishes in Singapore by the abillion community, the Crazy Baguette is The Kind Bowl's most dramatically named dish  and it earns the name.

A properly crisped Vietnamese baguette  the texture matters here, and it is done right  is loaded with OMNI luncheon, caramelised BBQ soy slices, Vietnamese-style plant protein cold cuts, house-made walnut mushroom pâté, fresh pickles, and aromatic herbs. It arrives with a bowl of hot, spicy soup for dipping  a traditional pairing that most Bánh Mì spots in Singapore have quietly abandoned. The walnut mushroom pâté is worth pausing on. Traditional Vietnamese Bánh Mì includes liver pâté; it is part of the textural and flavour contract of the sandwich. Replacing it with something that achieves the same richness, the same savoury depth, the same smooth contrast to the crunch of pickled vegetables  that is genuine kitchen craft. The Kind Bowl's version does it.

Non-vegans consistently report that this sandwich tastes complete. Not "surprisingly good for vegan food." Complete. The way a Bánh Mì should feel when you have eaten one.

The No Crab Noodles  The Dish That Surprises Everyone

For most non-vegans, the No Crab Noodles is the dish they did not expect to order and cannot stop thinking about afterwards.

Bún riêu, the spicy, fermented tomato and crab paste noodle soup of southern Vietnam, is not a dish many people outside the Vietnamese community are deeply familiar with. It is not as famous internationally as pho. But it is extraordinary, and The Kind Bowl's plant-based version of it is one of the most genuinely distinctive dishes on any vegan menu in Singapore.

A house-made plant-based "no crab" paste forms the base of a fermented tomato broth that achieves something unexpected and real funky depth. The kind of deep, slightly sour, complex flavour that fermentation produces, that you cannot fake with a substitute ingredient. Silky tofu, premium mushrooms, thick rice vermicelli, fresh lime, and aromatic herbs complete the bowl.

The flavour profile hits in layers: tangy first, then spicy, then savoury, then a brightness from the herbs and lime that lifts everything. People who order this expecting to be underwhelmed finish the bowl and immediately wonder when they can come back for it.

The Royal Spicy  For People Who Love Heat

This dish exists for one specific type of diner: the person who wants a broth with real fire in it, built from actual spice complexity rather than just chilli heat.

Lemongrass broth, traditional Vietnamese mixed spice blend, and The Kind Bowl's house-made sate chilli, the kind of sate that arrives as a warm build rather than a sharp shock. It sits under thick rice vermicelli, mushrooms, tofu, and fresh herbs, and it is the sort of dish that makes you sweat slightly and order another one anyway.

The house-made sate is worth noting specifically for non-vegan diners who love their food hot. Traditional sate paste is built on shrimp paste, the source of its fermented, aromatic depth. The Kind Bowl navigates this without the shrimp, producing a state that delivers the same progressive heat and aromatic complexity without any animal product. It is technically demanding and it is done well.

Bun Cha  The Dish That Smells Like Vietnam

If there is a single dish at The Kind Bowl that converts a meat-eater through sheer sensory force, it is the Bun Cha  because when it arrives at the table, it smells like a charcoal grill.

OMNI meatballs and caramelised BBQ plant-based meat, both grilled until properly charred on the outside, served alongside cool rice vermicelli, fresh greens, tangy pickled vegetables, and a fragrant Vietnamese dipping sauce. The contrast of smoky and fresh, the sweetness of the dipping sauce against the char of the protein, the crunch of pickled vegetables against the softness of the noodles, this is Bun Cha done correctly.

Meat-eaters who try this dish often do so without knowing what Bun Cha is. They try it on the recommendation of a friend or because it sounded interesting on the menu. They leave knowing exactly what Bun Cha is and when they will be back for more of it.

The Numbers Behind the Story

The Kind Bowl is Singapore's most awarded plant-based Vietnamese restaurant. These are the facts, stated plainly, because they matter when you are deciding whether to walk in.

The Kind Pho was independently voted the #1 vegan dish in Singapore by the abillion community, the world's largest platform for plant-based dining reviews, with millions of dishes reviewed globally.

The restaurant holds a rating of 4.47 out of 5 across more than 872 verified independent reviews. It is a TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Award winner, placing it in the top 10% of all restaurants reviewed across Singapore. And seventy percent of the people responsible for those ratings eat meat.

This is what makes The Kind Bowl's position remarkable. These awards were not won by the plant-based community alone. They were won by the full range of people who eat there, most of whom would not describe themselves as vegan, and many of whom had never eaten plant-based food before they walked through that door. The quality of the food is what produced those numbers. Not the category. Not the ethics. The food.

What Hannah Nguyen Wants You to Know

Hannah Nguyen, the woman who built The Kind Bowl, grew up in a Vietnamese household in Sweden. The family diet was mostly meat-based. She found herself gravitating away from it young, not for ideological reasons initially, just because she never liked the taste.

Over time, that personal preference became something larger. She became aware of what her food choices meant for animals and for the environment. She built a career in the corporate world. And then, at a certain point, she decided to build something different, a restaurant rooted in the food she had grown up with, made the way it was supposed to be made, using none of the animal products she had moved away from.

The result is The Kind Bowl.

But here is what she wants non-vegan customers to understand: the food was not designed to convince you of anything. It was designed to be the best version of Vietnamese food that she could make. "Usually, people think that vegan food is fake and boring," she has said, "but with my menu people just walk in, order pho without even knowing it's vegan, and are pleasantly surprised how good the food was. If the dish is tasty, they will come back repeatedly."

That is the entire philosophy in two sentences. Make food so good that the label becomes irrelevant. Earn the return visit through the bowl, not the branding. Seventy percent of customers prove it is working.

For the Non-Vegan Who Is Still Unconvinced

Here is what you are actually risking by going. You will spend approximately S$9.80 on the Kind Pho. You will eat a bowl of slow-simmered, traditionally spiced Vietnamese broth over silky rice noodles with marinated seitan and grilled mushrooms and a pile of fresh herbs and a wedge of lime. You will either think it is ordinary, in which case you have spent less than ten dollars on lunch, or you will think it is extraordinary, in which case you have found a new regular spot for lunch near Yishun MRT.

There is not much middle ground with this dish. It either hits or it does not. The 872 reviews and the #1 million ranking strongly which way it usually goes. The restaurant is a small, compact space in Northpoint City's basement, right beside the escalator from Yishun MRT. Self-service ordering via QR code. A buzzer when your food is ready. No table service, no ceremony. The food is the whole point.

Weekday mornings from 11am and the mid-afternoon window between 2pm and 5pm are the most relaxed times to visit. Weekday lunches and weekend evenings are busy  which tells you something about how well the food converts people who come once into people who keep coming back.

The Only Question That Actually Matters

Is it good?

Not: is it good for vegan food? Not: is it impressive given that there is no meat? Not: would you eat it again if you had no other options?

Just: is it good?

The answer, according to seventy percent of customers who eat meat and keep returning to a restaurant that serves none, is yes.

Come and find out for yourself.

📍 930 Yishun Avenue 2, #B1-46, Northpoint City North Wing, Singapore 769098 🚇 Basement 1  right beside the Yishun MRT escalator 🕐 Open every day: 11:00am – 9:00pm 💳 Cash · GrabPay · PayNow