Noodle Bar Near Me in Little Saigon: Hai Ky Mi Gia's Duck Noodles

Hai Ky Mi Gia opens at 9am, five days a week, at 707 Ellis Street between Larkin and Polk, and the order most regulars place is thick egg noodles with a braised duck leg. The family noodle house has been on this block of the Tenderloin's Little Saigon since April 1987, it closes at 6pm, and it is dark every Tuesday and Wednesday. If you are searching noodle bar near me around Civic Center or Polk Gulch, this is the bowl locals have been sending people to for almost four decades.

The founder is Tuan Hua, who opened Hai Ky Mi Gia in April 1987 and spent years as its head chef. His family are ethnic Chinese of Teochew descent who lived in Vietnam, came to the United States in 1979, and first ran a restaurant called Kim Kee in Los Angeles' Chinatown before moving north, according to a 2018 San Francisco Chronicle feature. The restaurant's own site still calls it a mom and pop noodle house, established 1987, cooking traditional Teochew food.

The Chronicle's Brea Salim described the menu as a cuisine that encapsulates two immigrant identities, and that is the best way to read it: Chinese wheat-and-egg noodle cooking shaped by decades in Vietnam. In that 2018 piece, Hua's daughter Randi had taken over the kitchen, and Amy Han, who married into the family and had worked the floor since 1996, ran the front of the room. It remains a family operation, not a chain, with one address.

Order the braised duck leg noodles. The Chronicle reported that the duck is braised overnight in the family's own sauce, and the Infatuation, which rated Hai Ky Mi Gia an 8.2 in May 2024, wrote that the thick egg noodles are firm without sacrificing chew and best topped with a duck leg that gets more tender the longer it sits in the soup. Let the bowl rest a minute before you start pulling meat off the bone.

Most noodle dishes on the menu let you pick your noodle: wide or thin egg noodles, rice noodles, glass noodles or vermicelli. You can also have them in soup or dry, with the broth served in a separate bowl on the side, which keeps the egg noodles springy and lets you season the soup yourself. A diner quoted in the Chronicle ordered by name, mee gia for thin egg noodles, and staff will understand you if you do the same.

Beyond the duck, the house special noodles pile minced pork, sliced pork, shrimp, fish cake, char siu and chicken into one bowl, which is the move if you want to taste everything the kitchen prepares. Rare beef with beef balls is the lighter option, and the beef stew noodles bring brisket and tendon in a tomato-based sauce. The Infatuation also recommends the bun bo hue, served with slippery rice noodles, for anyone who wants more heat and lemongrass.

The Infatuation's advice is to order the extra strong coffee no matter what time it is, and the official menu lists both Vietnamese coffee and a house soy milk. Since the kitchen opens at 9am, a bowl of noodles with an iced Vietnamese coffee is a real breakfast here, not a novelty. Outside of noodles, the menu runs to Hainan chicken rice and an order of ten spicy wontons, which works as a shared starter for two people before the soups arrive.

The Infatuation describes the room as bustling at all times of the day and the dining room as deceptively big, which matches the experience of walking in from a narrow Ellis Street frontage and finding more tables than expected. In 2018 the Chronicle photographed the lunch system at work: a clipboard where customers write their names while they wait for a seat. If the room is full at noon, look for that list near the door and add your party.

The simplest way to avoid the noon crowd is to come early. Doors open at 9am, so a late-morning bowl around 10am beats the office lunch rush from Civic Center, and mid-afternoon before the 6pm close is usually calmer too. Remember the schedule before you make the trip: Hai Ky Mi Gia is closed every Tuesday and Wednesday, and it does not serve dinner, so a 7pm craving will have to wait for the next morning.

For years this was a cash-only room; the official site now says plainly that it takes cash and credit cards. Takeout and delivery are available through Uber Eats and DoorDash, both linked from the restaurant's site, which helps on a rainy day. The family also posts temporary closures on that site, as it did for September 5 through 9, 2026, so anyone planning a special trip across town can glance at the homepage notice first, then head over.

The same 2018 Chronicle piece called the restaurant a refuge for many, a room where Chinese and Vietnamese food traditions share one menu and one family has fed the neighborhood for nearly forty years. The room moves quickly once you are seated, so read the menu while you wait, decide on your noodle type and whether you want it in soup or dry, and give the whole table's order at once so the kitchen can fire every bowl together.

Hai Ky Mi Gia sits inside the stretch of Larkin Street and the surrounding Tenderloin blocks known as Little Saigon. Two blocks south, Saigon Sandwich at 560 Larkin Street is a small banh mi counter that also closes at 6pm, so it is an easy second stop for a sandwich to take home for later. Pho 2000, at 637 Larkin Street, stays open into the evening if someone in your group still wants a bowl of beef noodle soup after the walk.

The address is 707 Ellis Street, San Francisco, CA 94109, between Larkin and Polk Streets, and the phone number is (415) 771-2577. Hours are Thursday through Monday, 9am to 6pm, closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The 19 Polk and 31 Balboa Muni lines stop at Larkin and Eddy, and the 38 Geary stops at O'Farrell and Larkin; Civic Center BART is the closest rail station. Street parking is limited, and the restaurant points drivers to public parking at the Cova Hotel across the street. Ask Karpo in the Karpo APP for more Little Saigon noodle picks.