This past weekend, in an Overland Park space that once churned out plates of barbecue, people lined up for something different.

Inside the former Smoke Town BBQ space, customers dug into boils of Vietnamese pho.

There are plenty of pho spots across Overland Park, but this one has something on the menu that the others don’t: seafood boils.

Pho & Boil, part Vietnamese eatery and part Cajun seafood spot, “soft opened” its doors on Sunday off Shawnee Mission Parkway in Overland Park.

Pho & Boil opened at 7702 Shawnee Mission Parkway

• The restaurant occupies a space just off Shawnee Mission Parkway and Robinson Street, near Abelardo’s Mexican Fresh and Chosun Korean BBQ.
• Smoke Town BBQ occupied that spot for roughly six years before its closure in June 2026.
• Pho & Boil’s regular hours are 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday through Monday.

Pho & Boil serves Vietnamese and Cajun cuisine

Though the restaurant is slowly phasing in its menu in its first few weeks open, the full menu includes both pho (a Vietnamese noodle soup) and seafood dishes like boiled shrimp and snow crab legs.

The menu also offers six seafood boils, served with a choice of crawfish, shrimp, snow crab, or a combination of those options. One dish on the menu combines the restaurant’s two sides — banh canh cua, a thick crab and seafood noodle soup.

The restaurant will also serve other items like “shaking” beef plates and fried rice, as well as boba tea made with fresh juice and sugar from an in-house sugarcane press.

“The Cajun food is kind of a little salty and spicy, and that’s how we came up with boba tea — because of the sweetness,” said owner Ken Pham. “I think that’s a good combination.”

The menu reflects the owner’s experience

Customers inside the restaurant can get a direct look at the history of the pho they’re eating. A large graphic on the wall walks through the timeline of the dish, from its Vietnamese birth and early influences in the early 1900s to its crossing of the Vietnamese border into other countries in the 1970s.

The menu itself reflects a bit of history too — Pham’s history. Before he relocated to the Kansas City metro area, multiple generations of his family previously ran a Vietnamese restaurant in Texas.

It’s those same slow-simmered recipes that Pham decided to bring into his menu at the Overland Park spot.

“I tried to keep it the same because we have such a good recipe,” he said.

He also grew up on Cajun flavors, visiting other family members that lived in New Orleans and watching as they soaked and boiled fresh seafood.

“I don’t think there’s any fusion like this in the Kansas City metro,” Pham said. “That’s why I said, ‘Why don’t we just open it in one spot?’”

So far, Pham said, customers are responding to that idea with enthusiasm. Some of them even have come back to the counter and ordered another dish after finishing their first one.

It’s that type of response from Pho & Boil’s first customers that’s exciting to Pham, as the restaurant gets on its feet and finalizes its menu.

“I want to hear the feedback from the community,” he said. “We need to learn something new every day.”

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