Belmont Optique Optometric Center

This is hands down the best optometry office in the peninsula. Dr. Kim is fantastic. She explains everything clearly and is both detailed and efficient during the exam. The office is spotless and well organized, and the team here is genuinely welcoming. The whole visit was smooth and fast, and I left with perfectly fitted glasses right after my appointment. The location is super convenient, close to the 101 with plenty of parking. I’m glad I finally found an eye doctor I trust!

Dr Kim does an amazing job. She is very professional and detailed. She was my eye doctor for years and I moved away and my new optometrist was less than. I came back to see Dr Kim while visiting town and she fixed my daily contact prescription, helped me get a better set of progressive lenses, and bifocal contacts for diving. It such a relief to be back in her skilled hands. Having someone with her care and experience taking care of my eyesight is invaluable.

The team is pretty nice and they have a decent selection of frames. Dr. Kim doesn’t care about her patients as much. She’s focused on nickelling and dimming her customers and not their general well-being. Instead of trying to get the best glasses for me, she was really focused on how to upsell and get as much $ as possible, which is irritating when you are trying to use your insurance for a decent pair of reading glasses.

Convenient location, lots of parking, very clean, staff is really friendly & helpful. Dr. Kim is very patient & professional; she also uses state of the art technology to determine patient contact & glasses prescriptions. Covid precautions are treated seriously here, which is appreciated.

I'm considered a "hard to fit" contact lens patient, because I've had LASIK / PRK, but still need glasses or contacts to correct the residual refractive error. While my eye exam and glasses prescription went well here, Dr. Kim had erroneously diagnosed me as, essentially, not able to obtain clear, crisp vision with any prescription or brand of contact lenses, which turned out to be completely wrong. This extremely disappointing, yet false diagnoses, caused me a lot of grief, as well as time and resources to obtain second and third opinions. Your mileage may vary if you're a straight-forward glasses/contacts case, but if you have atypical needs, I suggest you seek other optometrists that may be more knowledgeable in that area. For the straight-forward cases: The positive is that the eye exam and glasses / contacts prescription process was quite thorough, Dr. Kim was meticulous and really took her time, and she got my glasses prescription just right. The front desk person (Allie) was extremely friendly and knowledgable, and it's normally quick and easy to get an appointment. On the downside, their glasses selection was very limited, and nearly every single pair they had in stock exceeded the VSP benefit amount, meaning that you have to pay an overage out-of-pocket. It may be cheaper just to buy a pair of glasses elsewhere or online, rather than choosing from the available pairs in the shop. Further, they don't seem to be able to order glasses for you; I say this because my insurance also includes a pair of computer glasses, and I was told that they don't have any in stock, which ended the conversation. Other optometrist places would tell me that they can order computer glasses for me if they don't have them in stock. For my "hard-to-fit" case: Dr. Kim had me try on contact lenses of varying brands and curvatures ranging from +1.00 to +2.00, and ended up prescribing me a +1.50, after 2 visits. I let her know that my vision was pretty unclear with this prescription, even though I could see perfectly clear with glasses. She told me that because of my cornea shape post-LASIK / PRK, because of the fact that contact lenses sit right on top of the eye, and that I have some minor astigmatism, I would not be able to achieve that perfectly clear and crisp vision as I do with glasses. This was extremely disappointing because I could not see 20/20 with the +1.50 contact lens prescription she had given me (I was maybe seeing a blurry 20/40 at best), and I was in despair because having to wear glasses during all waking hours was uncomfortable and annoying. I ended up getting another opinion from an optometrist at Stanford, who, on his first try, lowered my contact lens prescription to a mere +0.50. He said a prescription of +1.50, as Dr. Kim had ordered, was a drastic over-correction. I am now seeing a very clear 20/20 with this new prescription, thanks to this Stanford optometrist. I believe Dr. Kim did not have the proper knowledge to correctly prescribe contact lenses for hard-to-fit, post-LASIK/PRK folks like myself. Her conclusion that I just won't be able to see clearly with any contact lens was devastating and turned out to be just plain wrong. For this reason, I cannot recommend Dr. Kim.