Nothing But Words
Michael Toppa's Personal Blog
The “I Love Phở” tour in Australia
For my readers in Australia (who probably number somewhere between 0 and 1), check out the “I Love Phở” tour. I received this announcement from the person organizing it, and thought I’d pass it along.
I Love Phở uses Phở as a metaphor to interpret and reveal a Việt Nam whose people and history are as varied and complex as the preparation and cooking of a bowl of Phở itself. Through its own global journey, Phở is unique, flexible and versatile in borrowing, adapting, modifying, ultimately creating its own culinary experience. It challenges all notions of the hybrid, traditional and authentic where adaptation, migration and movement are common in an era of intense globalisation.
I Love Phở combines the work of seven artists; a catalogue including essays, non-fictions, recipes and poems written by well-known Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese writers; guided tours; Phở tasting and Phở cooking demonstrations. This aims to create dialogues between visual artists, local communities and broader audiences exploring issues of identity, history, culture and diaspora over a bowl of Phở. Each destination also includes the work of local artists commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a pho review. I have a backlog of a few I’ve been meaning to write (two more in Philly and one in San Mateo), and hopefully I’ll get to those soon. But for now I’ll weave my talk of pho with my ongoing talk of Tokyo. Pho is not easy to find in Japan. While the Vietnamese diaspora in Tokyo is big enough to sustain at least a few Vietnamese restaurants, you usually need to go to a specialty shop to get good pho. Thanks to the dazzling pho-king site, I was aware of at least one pho restaurant in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I never made it there - it would have been an excursion to get there from where we lived, and it just never made it to the top of the list. But I did stumble across the Com Pho stand in the basement of the Marunouchi Oazo shopping center, located across the street from Tokyo station. Com Pho is a chain with four locations in Tokyo, but I haven’t been to the others.
I was visiting the shopping center with the family, but couldn’t persuade them to join me for pho. So I sat with them while they ate Chinese food next door, and then I got pho take out afterwards. Like many inexpensive restaurants in Japan, you order at Com Pho by putting your money in a vending machine and pushing the button for the food you want, and then the machine gives you a ticket that you take to the counter. It saves the restaurant staff from spending time behind a cash register. If you want a drink, they have free water, or you can get your own drink from one of the ubiquitous soda machines that are on every block in Tokyo.
When I go to a pho restaurant, I have certain expectations. One of them is that they serve pho. I found myself baffled by the Com Pho menu: it had four choices, and none of them resembled any kind of pho I was familiar with. The staff was not Vietnamese, none of the broths appeared similar to traditional pho broth, and the soups were filled with vegetables like asparagus and broccoli. So, it turned out to be a typical Japanese bastardization of foreign food. Another example is pizza: if you’ve ever had pizza in Japan, you know that they typically put things like mayonnaise, corn, nori (dried seaweed), and Tabasco sauce on it.
I decided to go for the green curry pho. It was actually much more like a Thai soup, with a coconut milk-based broth, ground meat, and lots of basil. For that reason I’m not giving it a rating, since it simply was not pho. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. It was quite tasty, and I hadn’t had any Vietnamese or Thai food in the 5 months we had lived in Tokyo, so it was a nice change of pace.
Location: The Marunouchi Oazo shopping center site’s access page has a couple PDFs that show you how to find the shopping center. Com Pho is on the basement floor. The phone number is 03-3216-0564, but be ready to speak Japanese!
Rating: 
4248 Spruce St
Philadelphia, PA 19104
(215) 222-6800
As the only source of Pho within walking distance of my office in University City, this greasy spoon gets a free extra half star in its rating. In fact, I think it’s the only pho in the city west of the Schuylkill River (after moving here two years ago I was dumbfounded when I learned that it’s pronounced “skoo-gull” - go figure). What’s visible in the restaurant from a patron’s perspective hovers just on the sticky edge of sanitary. It’s a small restaurant, seating about 25, and I’m told that until recently it had a tattered “Grand Opening” banner festooned across its front wall for about 2 years. I went with a couple co-workers who were already familiar the place, and as we placed our order, the waitress sounded so profoundly bored I was worried she was going to stroll out into the traffic after leaving our table, just to put some excitement in her day.
Having said all that, the pho actually wasn’t bad. Fortunately, the numerous drops of oil floating on the surface of the pho (not something you normally see) didn’t seem to affect the flavor. The main thing they got right was the meat - it was of a decent quality and it wasn’t overcooked or undercooked. My only complaint with the meat was that they didn’t have lean brisket on the menu - if you wanted brisket, you had to go with the fat brisket :-(. The noodles and the extras (sprouts, basil, etc.) were all fine. But they failed to inspire where it counts the most: the broth. The broth is the hardest thing to get right with pho, and it’s the most important thing to get right. The broth wasn’t bad, but it was bland, lacking the complex flavor that defines a good bowl of pho.
For me the main attraction of Pho Cafe Saigon is that I can go there for lunch without disrupting my work day. But if you’re not limited to the University City area, then I’d say head down Washington Ave to Pho 75.
Rating:
1122 Washington Ave
Philadelphia, PA 19147
(215) 271-5866
Pho 75 is, for me, where it all began. To my knowledge, Pho 75 is one of only two pho chain restaurants (by that I mean more than just 2 or 3 locations). Pho 75 has 7 locations - they’re in Philly, Maryland and Virginia. The location in Arlington, VA is where I had my first bowl of pho, about 11 years ago. I haven’t been to the Arlington shop in many years, but I usually found it maddening to go there, because the quality of the pho was so inconsistent. I’ve had my best bowl of pho there, and many mediocre bowls as well. Now that I live in Philly, I’ve been to the South Philly location many times, and I’m happy to report that the quality of its pho is consistently high. Not the best ever, but definitely excellent.
Embedded in a Vietnamese shopping center, it has the perfect location. When I bring my family, after we eat we’ll wade through the crowd at the always crowded adjacent grocery store. Kai and I will ogle the lobsters and crabs crawling around in their tanks, and Maria will stock up on Asian cooking ingredients - the kind you won’t find at Acme. And I always find myself wandering through the trinket shops, awestruck by the airbrushed, glowing, back-lit wall hangings depicting rivers flowing through forests, with built-in sound effects of rushing water and chirping birds (and inside there’s some kind of rotating element that makes it look like the water is flowing). How, and more importantly, why, did somebody create this? Philly only has one of these shopping centers, and compared to the various sprawling “Little Saigon” centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s tiny. Even though there’s no Ranch 99 market (with the priceless slogan “we try harder for 100!”), the character is the same, and that’s what’s important.
The inside of the South Philly Pho 75 is cleaner than your average pho shop, but it has the standard array of long tables, fast service, and absolutely no decor of any kind. The soup is excellent in every respect: good broth, properly cooked noodles, and quality cuts of meat. On my most recent trip I went with my Indian co-worker Anand - he said he felt like he was in a typical restaurant in India, so I guess that means it has an “international” feel ;-). It’s always fun to indoctrinate a pho newbie - hot sauce or chili peppers? lemon or lime? how much basil, hoisin sauce, and sprouts to add? One of the great things about pho is how much you can tweak the flavor after it’s been served to you. After just one trip, Anand has become a phonatic, insisting that we must go back every other Friday. If that’s not a sign of a good bowl, I don’t know what is.
Rating:
Address:
2270 Kuhio Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
808-922-2668
I’ll use the occasion of our Hawaii trip to provide the first of my pho reviews. Kai fell asleep after we got back from Sea Life Park, I didn’t have much for lunch, and it was still a long time until dinner. So I set out in search of pho. Oahu has a number of pho shops. There are several in Chinatown, as well as a few scattered just past the western edge of Waikiki. On the day we arrived in Honolulu, we got a ride with a Vietnamese taxi driver, and he recommended Pho Bac 1 in Chinatown, but I didn’t have the opportunity to eat there. There’s only one pho shop in Waikiki itself, and that’s Pho Old Saigon, conveniently located on Kuhio Ave, about 60 ft. from the Marine Surf where we were staying, so I didn’t have to go far. It actually had a full menu of Vietnamese dishes, but pho was the feature dish.
Service was fast with a minimum of friendliness, and the decor was minimal - exactly the sort of things I expect in a good pho resutaurant. In the middle of touristy Waikiki, my expectations were low, but I received a quality bowl of pho. There was nothing unique about the flavor, but everything was above average: the broth was very good, they used quality meat, and the noodles weren’t overcooked. I ate there twice, and it was just as good the second time, so they also get good marks for consistency.
Update: I ended up abandoning this project, because of lack of time, and the rise of the excellent pho-king site.
In an earlier post I mentioned a new site I’m working on - phonatic.org. My goal is to make it THE pho destination site on the web (pho is Vietnamese beef noodle soup). One thing going for it already is that there’s no competition (if you Google “pho” you won’t find much beyond individual restaurant sites and recipes). The main feature will be restaurant reviews. For the traveller seeking pho, the site will be a godsend, as there are few things that are more satisfying than a good bowl of pho, and few things more disappointing than a bad one. I’m hoping that the content will be community driven, so I won’t have to do much beyond admin once the site is up and running.
I’ve been building the site with TikiWiki, but it’s been an exercise in frustration, so I’m going to try something else. I started with TikiWiki because I was unfamiliar with CMS (content management systems) and TikiWiki was the first one I came across. I was dazzled by the massive feature set. But TikiWiki is just big and ugly. The installation requires installing the files for all the features, even if you only want to use a fraction of them - it can really eat into your disk quota. The admin screens are a maze, and it takes a lot of effort to become familiar with where all the controls are. Many of the included themes don’t really work (bad css), and it’s fairly opaque in terms of understanding the modularity (i.e. figuring out how to customize anything involves a lot of hacking). Even with the nicer themes, it also just doesn’t look very good.
So I’ve been exploring some other options. I was on the verge of installing PHP Nuke, but then I found XOOPS. XOOPS looks like it’s very lean and modular. It appears to have a slower development cycle than PHP Nuke, which is a good thing (with only a handful of new versions of the core each year, module developers have a more stable environment to work in). Also, it seems to have a smaller and more professional community of developers - there aren’t a bazillion maybe-it-works-maybe-it-doesn’t add-on modules, and from what I can see the add-ons they do have are fairly stable. Lastly, it looks like someone already developed a “reviews” module, which may save me some work (XOOPS, like most CMS systems, comes with a built-in news/articles module, but that doesn’t quite provide everything you need for doing something like restaurant reviews).
If anyone reading this knows a thing or two about any other good CMS options, feedback is appreciated, Thanks.
