Nothing But Words

The “I Love Pho” Tour

Topic: Phonatic: Pho Reviews
Tags: Pho

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.

Com Pho (コム フォー), Tokyo: Four Flavors of Blasphemy

Topic: Japan 2007, Phonatic: Pho Reviews
Tags: Japan, Pho

The Com Pho (コム フォー) restaurant in the Marunouchi OAZO Shopping Center, near Tokyo station

The flavors of pho at Com Pho bear little resemblance to traditional Vietnamese pho

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!

Phonatic.org status

Topic: Phonatic: Pho Reviews, WordPress and Web Programming
Tags: Client Projects, Pho, PHP

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 traveler 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.