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Tales from a Pho House
Walking into Pho Hoacali Vietnamese Restaurant near San Diego, the smells of peppery basil and ginger stimulated my senses. I smiled, even before arriving at a table, at the Vietnamese love affair with fragrant food. Few countries match their repertoire of potent staples like lime leaves, ginger, and licorice root. Add red hot chilies, coconut milk, fish sauce, and the herbal trinity of basil, mint, and cilantro, and you end up with a kitchen pantry more aromatic than a perfume shop. These ingredients and others provide the backdrop to many of Vietnam’s dishes, include Pho Hoacali’s namesake specialty, Pho.
Since it’s conception in Hanoi, Pho has captured the attention of the rest of Vietnam and is now considered the national dish. Because of it’s warming effect on the body and soul, Pho has always been wildly popular in Hanoi where it is ladled out of huge steaming street market cauldrons during the frosty morning hours. Rich and nutritious, Pho is comfort food for the thousands of Vietnamese that partake of it every day.
Pho begins by simmering gelatin-rich beef shin bones with roasted ginger, cinnamon sticks, and peppercorns in water to get an aromatic, nourishing stock. Cooked rice noodles and raw bean sprouts are then placed in an over-sized bowl with slices of raw beef. The hot broth is ladled on top, heating the ingredients and turning the beef pink. Various other cuts of beef that have been braised in the broth are sliced thin and added to the bowl. Customers spike the soup with hot chiles, fish sauce, a squeeze of lime and fresh picked herbs to their liking.
Outside of Vietnam, pho appears wherever a community of Vietnamese has sprouted. Driving down a street one day in San Diego, looking for a place to get a haircut, I noted a large number of Vietnamese people and businesses around. I decided to venture into one of their restaurants, choosing one called Pho Hoacali, judging it to be a Pho house by the name. It’s in a strip mall not a street market. It’s a restaurant, not a cozy tarp-covered street stall. It’s a warm evening in suburban San Diego, not a chilly morning in Hanoi. So how authentic could it actually be. There was only one way to find out.
I started off by introducing myself to Hue, the cashier (she calls herself Julie for us non-phonetics). In between ringing up checks and packing to go orders, she answered my many questions. The interrogation seemed to stimulate her memory of the country she left at the age of thirteen. Well-spoken in her second language, she was serious and graceful but sometimes laughed at my unexplained curiosity. She was a hospitable host and an ambassador of what she knew about Vietnamese food, which was plenty.
Eighteen types of Pho appear on the menu, differing only by the types of beef they contain. A combination of them all - rare steak, well-done brisket, flank, tendon and tripe is listed as the special combo. The other seventeen are varying combinations of the same. I am glad to see tendon and tripe listed, a testament of authenticity. Julie explained that Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants helped introduce organ meats to North America, where they are still consumed mainly in ethnic communities. “But at least now you can drive down the street to an Asian store and buy tendon. That used to be impossible,” she exclaimed. Tendon, which looks and eats like a disk of clear, tender, beef-flavored gelatin is surprisingly good and gives a more complex substance to the dish. Basil comes with a separate plate of garnish. The herb is on the stem so that you may pick off fresh whole leaves and float them on top of the hot broth allowing the peppery scent to rise up with the steam- culinary aromatherapy! Toss in some bean sprouts, squeeze the lime, then swirl in the crushed chili paste. Then, leaning slightly over the bowl, fetch the noodles and beef with chopsticks and sip the broth with a spoon.
Beverages at Pho Hoacali are exotic and diverse. Soda Xi Muoi, which combines crushed salt-preserved plums, white sugar, and club soda drinks like a virgin sparkling plum margarita would, if there was such a thing. “It’s great for a hoarse voice,” said Julie. “All Vietnamese foods have some sort of medicinal value.” I didn’t try the Soda Sua Hot Ga, a blending of egg yolk, condensed milk and club soda, but it’s interesting to note that even though the French pulled out of Vietnam in 1954, the egg yolk is there to stay. Julie encouraged me to drive around San Diego and find another place that served fresh pennywort juice. “You’ll find it in the can anywhere, but we juice the leaves fresh.” “I’m going to take your word for it,” I answered, remembering the position of my car’s gas needle. The leaves juice into a chlorophyll green liquid that promotes general well-being. “We sell out of it every day,” she stated proudly. And I was proud to have helped her in that regard.
In Vietnam dessert is almost non- existent. Instead, sweet things are served throughout a meal in-between courses. That would explain why Vietnamese “desserts” are generally only slightly sweet and often made from non-traditional dessert ingredients. Che Ba Mau, tri-colored bean pudding on ice, is built by layering sweetened yellow mung beans into a tall glass, followed by a layer of sweet red kidney beans, topped off with iced coconut water and garnished with chewy strands of green colored gelatin. This is Vietnam’s version of an ice cream sundae. The kids love it, and it gives them nutritious protein at the same time. Xam Bam, an herbal dessert drink looks and tastes like sweetened iced tea with strands of various herbs and seaweeds floating in it.
Julie explained that the dishes served at Pho Hoacali represent only a tiny part of the Vietnamese table. Beyond Pho, Vietnam’s cuisine stretches from truly exotic droplets of flowery water beetle extract, to truly simple crunchy raw green beans. But all of Vietnam’s cuisine is based on two main principles - freshness and fragrance. I learned that Vietnamese food is as interesting and exotic as Julie’s real name, Hue. Pronounced “hway”, she shares the name with that of a fragrant white jasmine-like flower and the mountainous central region of Vietnam. Walking out of Pho Hoacali, I hoped to find a fog hovering over me and a thousand bicycles zooming by. As the door shut behind me, I opened my eyes. No fog, no bicycles, but that’s O.K., I’ll just have to come back.
Pho Hoacali is located at 9170 Mira Mesa Blvd in San Diego.
Open Sun - Thu 8AM - 9PM
Fri - Sat 8AM - 10PM
Telephone (858) 271-8341
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Rare Beef Pho at Pho Hoacali
Well Done Flank Pho at Pho Hoacali
Shrimp Spring Rolls
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