Restaurant of the Week: Kwon's

This week's restaurant: Kwon's Restaurant, 1625 W. Holt Ave. (at Dudley), Pomona.

I'd never taken notice of Kwon's until finding ecstatic reviews on Yelp and actively searching for the place one recent lunchtime. It's out on West Holt near St. Joseph's Church and housed in a skeevy-looking strip mall, although a CHP car parked outside offered some comfort.

Inside, Kwon's was bustling, with multiple people ordering at the counter, waiting for takeout or packed into the half-dozen tables or booths. The clientele was made up of laborers, families and a couple of employees from Lanterman, not to mention a hungry columnist.

The menu consists mostly of fried rice in numerous permutations of beef, pork, chicken and shrimp, with or without vegetables. They also have chop suey, lo mein (or as a poster spells it, "low mein") and the dreaded orange chicken. I ordered shrimp fried rice with vegetables ($6.45) and hoped for the best.

What I got was a heaping plate -- Yelp reviewers estimate it at a pound -- of rice with cabbage, carrots, bean sprouts, scallions, onions and broccoli, and a generous amount of shrimp. Slightly bland, perhaps, but you get soy sauce and hot sauce. For a cheap meal of reasonable quality and unreasonable quantity, you can't beat it with a chopstick.

I took home half my order and got a second meal out of it.

Apparently Kwon's was upgraded a year or two ago. Yelpers say the storefront sign used to read only "Restaurant"; now it gives the full name and says "since 1983." Long may they fry.