Everybody Loves Pho.

I’ve been on an Anthony Bourdain bender lately. The snow is burying up the city, the trains aren’t moving and kids aren’t going to school. Snow days have been Tony days. If I’m not eating and traveling, I might as well watch someone else do it. I’m a masochist in that way. Both Hulu and Netflix have various shows featuring Bourdain, but the gist is all the same, mouthy middle aged white man/chef travels to interesting places in the world and eats his heart out. My dream job if there was ever one. I wouldn’t even mind being a middle aged white man to do it. But really though, I want his job.

Out of all the places that he has been to, Vietnam is his favorite place and I totally get it. Vietnamese food in Vietnam is amazeballs. I moved from Vietnam 15 years ago and could still remember what all my favorite street food tasted like, and even where I used to get them. My only regret from my trip in 2011 is that I didn’t eat enough. In America, I love me some fried chicken/chicken wings, I eat Chinese food like a fiend and I would shell out money for quality sushi, but I approach Vietnamese food like a paranoid cat to a stranger. I’m extremely picky with Vietnamese food in America. 

Now, before I go on, I want to make a clarification, when I say Vietnamese food, for all purposes I mean street food/restaurant food, not meals that you get at home. Things that you see at Vietnamese restaurants like pho or other types of noodles soup, for instance, are considered street food, not meals. People in Vietnam don’t regularly cook food like pho for a daily meal. One is because the broth alone could take up a day of cooking and two is why go to all that effort when you can just go out to the corner shop and slurp down a bowl real fast. The Vietnamese meal experience at home is very different, but I digress.

Moving on… every dish I eat at a restaurant, I can’t help but compare to its counterpart that I consumed while in the motherland. Some come close, and some are probably even better for me with healthier cooking alternatives, but there is never an exact experience. Be it the location, the person who cooked it, the person I am with — eating food at a Vietnamese restaurant in America isn’t as great of an experience for me as eating food at a Vietnamese restaurant in Vietnam. This is especially the case for me with pho (pronounce fuh). 

Growing up as a child, I didn’t eat a lot of pho. I was raised in a household that didn’t have a pennant for snacking or street food. Near our house there was a pho stall (not unlike the one below, but without the propane tank, also in a similar location) that I would pass by at least twice a day. 

They would open early in the morning for the breakfast crowd and early the evening for the late diner crowd. Typing this, I could still smell the aroma from more than 15 years ago. The essence of beef and anise mixed in with the burning wood and charcoal smell from the stove. In a way, pho was the fancy hard to get food that I only get in special occasion, and so whenever I do get to eat it, it’d be an over the top experience, the meat, the broth, the nice burp at the end when you washed everything down with a nice cold Coke. 

I distinctively remember my first bowl of pho in America, and I can only compare the experience to someone’s experience of tasting diet soda for the first time after a life time of drinking regular soda. The taste is there, but not quite the same, something is missing, but I can’t tell what it is. Even thought the pho bowls in America are bigger, there are more meat and noodles, and I can have as many bowls as I want, my palates aren’t ecstatic. Even now, after 15 years of eating pho in America, whenever I’m told that there’s a good pho place, I’m always skeptical — by what standard? I guess you could say that am perpetually chasing that feeling of the first pho love. 

Reading this article on the history and variation of pho, however, I realized that maybe my estranged relationship with pho isn't because I am haunted by the ghost of pho past, but more because I have just been tasting pho made by people from a different region from where I used to live. Simply put, I have some reevaluation of perspective to do. At anyrate, the article features an interview with people who know what they are doing and talking about when it comes to pho, and even has recipes. 

One of the many perks of living in Southern California is I don't have to travel very far for pho when I get a craving. Here's a nice bowl from a hole-in-the-wall down the street from my home in LA.

Since moving to Boston, I have had pho twice and neither was anything to write home about, so I haven't been too keen on grubbing down more pho, or actively seeking out a good place. Though I know it's out there. Without my noticing, pho has become steadily and increasing known, accepted and love by the population, if not the world. I know very few people who have never had pho. When I was living in Ghana, I was told that there was a pho restaurant in Accra, the capital city. Pho in Africa! Who would have thought!? My homie, Tony Bourdain went to New Orleans for food, drinks and debauchery but had pho for breakfast — got Vietnam on his mind! Macklemore loves pho as much as he loves thrift shopping, probably, and his friend loves it so much, he did a Kickstarter project to make a video about it.

It makes me feel so good and proud when I see people having love for my culture, or any culture, in a positive way. It makes me want to share with them even more things that they didn’t know to really solidify this love. 

A lot of prints about pho would say that it’s Vietnam’s national food, and I really want you to know that it’s not. You can find it everywhere in Vietnam, but it doesn’t represent all of Vietnam. So since you already spent some time reading this blog post on my feelings about pho, why not catch my next post on the other amazing noodles soups that Vietnam has to offer. It’d only be good for you, I promise. 

Up next, Bun Bo Hue!