"Enough," I answered, lifting my spoon and chopsticks. "How many bowls is that? Eight?" asked a waitress who learned that I was on a quest. Pho Lê serves southern-style soup with a bit of sweetness, cut with a squeeze of lime and a hit of heat. I capped the night at Pho Lê near Chinatown, where the streets were mobbed with teens on scooters out for an evening cruise. I buzzed around Ho Chi Minh City, from the modern center to French Colonial sections that still seemed straight from a Graham Greene novel, slurping bowl after amazing bowl of soup. It was fantastic-the kind of stuff that, at about $2 a bowl, makes it easy to understand why high-end dining is a fringe activity in Vietnam. The house specialty is pho with rare tenderloin and braised rib meat. Our table was pre-loaded with a large plate of greens the broth was ladled from vats big enough to bathe in. That's partly because the restaurant opens at 3 a.m., allowing truckers to stop in for a meal before the city closes to big rigs at 6 a.m. "This place is for truck drivers," Mai Truong, a food-centric guide, told me at Pho Tau Bay, a utilitarian place on a major thoroughfare. In this up-all-night town, a hungry, thrifty eater and his friends can be in and out of a world-class pho joint in 10 minutes. This rich, cloudy soup is accompanied by a thicket of sawtooth herb, basil, mint and sprouts that you tear up with your hands and add to the bowl. Ho Chi Minh City's pho is the garage wine of Vietnam's scene, forgoing refinement for big flavors. A visitor might shy away from the curbside restaurants, but they are open-air marvels of efficiency, ingenuity and mise en place: a line cook's dream, where everything is set up in bowls, ready to put together in an instant. What seems like the entire population buzzes by on scooters as customers slurp away at their soup. Hanoi's best pho shops are concentrated in the narrow, shop-crammed streets of the Old Quarter. "We go to the market every day and want to see our fish killed for us and our chicken still alive." "We eat very fresh food here," said Mai Corlou, who runs Madame Hien restaurant, explaining the local predilection for letting ingredients speak for themselves. It comes with a clearer broth, rarely strays beyond beef and is crowned with a Spartan sprinkling of just-picked scallions and chives. In northern Vietnam, Hanoi's pho is as austere as a classic Burgundy. I was riveted by the drawn-out process of creating the broth, from charring onions and ginger in the bottom of a mammoth stockpot to smashing lemongrass with a metal ladle to release its flavor, to the way the broth bubbled away overnight, slowly yielding the flavors that make it the wine of the soup world. I had cooked in plenty of restaurants, but had never made anything like pho. My dinner there was so good that I asked for (and got) a part-time job in the kitchen. Pho was little known on American shores in the late 1990s, when chef Didi Emmons opened Pho Republique in then-gritty Central Square. My pho fascination started far from Vietnam, in Cambridge, Mass. The two cities make very different styles of pho-and the competition between them is fierce.
Of course, at the other end of the country, in clamoring, cosmopolitan Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), citizens beg to differ. "Not because only Hanoi has it, but because only in Hanoi is pho delicious." "Pho is a particular gift of Hanoi," Vietnamese writer Thach Lam penned back in the 1940s, displaying an attitude that hasn't changed much since.
People gobble the soup morning, noon and night-and they are possessive about it. In this densely packed northern city that rises with the sun and quiets when it sets, many vendors ride around town on their bicycles, with woven trays of tiny limes, garlic and blistering hot peppers on the handlebars.
Regardless of where it was born, pho's spiritual home is Hanoi.
0 kommentar(er)
