My wife’s uncle (our restaurant manager and taste guru) visited
this place when he was in Hanoi ( He tasted six different places in one
morning) and said this is the best he tasted that day. We had to try it and
after two attempts to go there; it was closed, we finally sat down and had a
bowl.
Now this place is busy and a bit different than most of the
other restaurants around; you stand in a line (or what passes for a line in a
non-queuing country) to get your order and carry it yourself to an available
table. There are no available tables, rather spots at tables you have to hunt
for and squeeze into with other customers. So if you’re by yourself you have to
carry a steaming and overflowing bowl of Pho around looking for a spot to open
up. It must be worth it as the place was packed.
The bowl came with a plate of (chinese) donuts for dipping
and a nice mound of beef that was cut from the handy hanging piece next to the
cook. This place has one person getting the soup, one getting the meat and one
doing the final assembly; it is crazy busy.
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| I'll have the mound of meat on the right |
 |
| Must go through gallons every hour |
The taste was fabulous and the best Hanoi style Pho I have
had yet; beefy goodness in a bowl. The other prominent taste was the added
Vietnamese green onions. Again I qualify this as Hanoi style Pho as it was not
what would be called Pho in the south or at home. This is the original taste of
what our Pho was when it started its evolution into the Pho we recognise in
Vancouver.
My belief is that food evolves along with the people and
their environment. Traditional dishes and a cuisine like the people are a
product of their environment. Vietnam is rapidly evolving as is the cuisine that is part of that changing society.
Ideas, like people are moving and changing at an amazing pace as such the food
is being influenced by that change. Food and the ways to prepare it is moving
around the country and changing the menus in even the smallest village.
The Pho we serve at Mui Ngo Gai is a result of people moving
around Vietnam and during the Diasporas have occurred 1) during the separation
of North and South in the early 1950s 2) after the end of the Vietnam War with
its the mass movement of people overseas. You can taste the influence of this
change of environments on the taste of the soup and on what we expect it to
taste like. The north serves up a bowl of Pho that is beefy but has very little
spicing (not spice as in hot rather in strength of added spices) of the broth.
It is a good satisfying bowl of soup with the right noodles and beef but lacks
the aroma we expect. In the south the soup takes on a bit of a more spicy tone
but not as much as in Vancouver. The broth in Vancouver is much more aroma and
better quality of beef.
In each place we have had Pho over the years (North, South
and at home) we have found each taste authentic to the place and each bowl
satisfying in its own way. When you look at the journey this soup has taken
with the people who have made it, I am very appreciative at evolution of
various tastes of this soup and of the strength of the people who took it with
them to their new homes. There is no one right taste of Pho, there is just the
taste you know to be Pho.
Another blog about this restaurant smittenbyfood.blogspot.com
And another www.travelandleisure.com
Youtube video http://www.youtube.com
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