Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  My first pho in Vietnam is at Pho Gia Truyen, at 49 Bat Dan. It comes highly and multiply recommended. I arrive at seven in the morning and there’s already a line into the street, which catches me off guard. Later I learn that the line is left over from thoi bao cap, Vietnam’s subsidy period, which happened from 1954 to 1986. Everything from food to fabric was rationed then, and people used coupons out of a booklet to get their rice, their necessities, the little beef that was available. Even now, you don’t just order and sit down to wait for your food. You watch as your meat is being weighed in order to make sure you aren’t being cheated.

  A woman slices the beef, and a man ladles the stock and showers each serving with green herbs. There are three pho options on offer: tai, rare beef; tai nam, rare beef and cooked flank; and chin, well-done beef; plus trung ga, egg yolk, for 5,000 dong per yolk, and quay, also known as you tiao, the Chinese doughnuts that are dipped into soymilk or congee. My tai nam costs 50,000 dong, about two dollars.

  There are condiments on the table: vinegar with garlic slices; a thin, vinegary red chili sauce; little red bird’s eye chilies that you aren’t supposed to eat, really (later I’ll learn that you’re supposed to just drop them into your soup to infuse it with spice; Vietnamese food isn’t about searing hotness). No basil, no jalapeños, no bean sprouts. In the bowl, smaller than what I’m used to, scallions float on the surface—the whites in longer ribbons, and the greens chopped—along with flecks of cilantro.

  It’s the noodles that are the main surprise: they’re soft. Prior to this, I’ve only ever encountered dried or semifresh noodles in pho—noodles with more chew. As it turns out, these are the noodles I will have over and over again on this trip—silky, made-the-same-day noodles. At Chau Long Market, just outside of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, noodles are brought in from the villages that specialize in them, wrapped in lotus leaves (or, less romantically, plastic-lined baskets). I learn that the banh pho noodles are at their most salable for only three hours, at which point they’ll turn slightly sour, and vendors have to discount them.

  The broth is more delicate than any I’ve ever encountered: gently spiced and onion-redolent, almost as clear as water. And though it’s my first time ever having this food, it’s as familiar and comforting as chicken noodle soup. I pick up the bowl to drink every last drop.

  Over the next few days, I’ll learn: how to cross the street (walk slowly into traffic without fear); where to put my purse while eating on the tiny plastic stools (folded between my lap and stomach); and that yogurt in coffee is unexpectedly addictive (try it!). I’ll learn that roosters in Hanoi have abandoned circadian rhythms—they crow at all hours—and cats love to fight. I’ll write in my notebook “People really love puffy jackets!”

  And I’ll find that pho is everywhere. It’s on streets and it’s in restaurants and it’s in restaurants that spill onto the street. For 275,000 dong, you can get a bowl of “Hanoian pho: beef, chicken with garnishes” at the swanky Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel; outside, pho runs about 30,000 dong. Would-be vendors set up shop on the street: stools, tables, stools as tables, and a large, immovable-until-empty pot. I saw before my trip that my friend Dennis, who’d also recently visited Vietnam, had posted on Facebook: “After eating #pho non stop for 2 weeks I finally found my ideal bowl. At 4pm everyday on a street corner in the old quarter of #Hanoi, these ladies bring out a stock pot filled with clear, savory, delicate broth from an apartment across the street and ladle it over fresh rice noodles, adding a few slivers of brisket and tendon and some fresh herbs to create the cleanest and most elegant pho I ever tasted. It only lasts for one hour a day before they run out.” Dutifully, I got the coordinates. But when I checked the intersection on multiple days, Dennis’s pho vendors never materialized. Maybe it was just their side hustle. Maybe they got what they needed, and moved along.

  Disappearing and reappearing is kind of the deal with pho. What you see on the streets when you visit Hanoi is only a couple decades old: street food was eliminated during the period of planned economy, and picked up where it left off when the government decided to return to a free market. In the late eighties, street pho stalls were some of the first small businesses to reemerge.

  Today, again, street food is under some scrutiny. I asked Mark Lowerson, an Australian expat who hosts street-food tours for tourists visiting Hanoi, about it over e-mail: “The pavement police crack down on all kinds of activity related to the use of pavements and roadsides. They are trying to control (among other things) how businesses manage customer motorbike parking, the roving vendors who sell fresh produce and other goods and also the street-food eateries that commonly seat patrons on plastic stools on the pavements. It’s very much like a game of cat and mouse. The police round the corner shouting through loudspeakers, everyone scatters—roving vendors disappear up alleyways, pavement furniture gets quickly shifted, people run to their motorbikes to move them—and then, five minutes later, everything goes back to ‘normal’ again.” Some people have moved their operations partly inside, so as to avoid official gaze: they’ll set up stools and tables in their low-ceilinged living spaces. (For lunch one day I ate fish noodle soup in what I think was a family’s living room, hung with framed family photographs; there were fake flowers in vases on the mantel.)

  That street pho ever disappeared is hard to wrap my mind around, because the street seems to be the place for innumerable activities. I watch people getting haircuts and manicures in the street. People crouched over little fires, burning paper money—counterfeit Ben Franklins—for their ancestors to use in the afterlife. In the afternoons, men washing their motorcycles using lots of soap. Men on their motorcycles asking do you want a ride. Men playing checkers. Women winnowing little bulbs of garlic, and the skins flying everywhere. Fringed pedicabs carrying older white people slowly being pedaled around. Old women in ricepaddy hats offering doughnuts, insistently, to tourists like me.

  “The most important part of making the broth is balancing with the fish sauce and the sugar,” Phan Thi Duyen tells me. She works as a chef at the Hanoi Cooking Centre, a cooking school that offers courses in traditional Vietnamese cooking. She’s thirty-three, from a small village in Hai Duong Province, but left home in her teens to cook in Hanoi. Her first job was at a pho shop, which was also where she ate pho for the first time, in 1999.

  It was a breakfast restaurant, as most pho restaurants were seventeen years ago. That’s no longer the case—you can find pho around the clock now. And pho was expensive, Duyen says, for poor families. Pho was “only for the people who were really rich, or who worked in offices, important people. Not normal people.” Pho was also food for the sick: “If children or old people are sick, it’s easier for eating, easier than rice.” She tells me that a family might buy one serving of pho and, to defray costs, split it among family members, mixed with rice.

  Pho is something she never makes at home, because the ingredients are too expensive to cook in a small batch. Back in her hometown, they’re almost unavailable. “When I come back to my country I cannot make it. I cannot get the beef bones, because one farmer makes one beef and sells it for the whole village,” she says. “For example, my family has five daughters and two sons. Even sometimes my mom gets the beef, but she always gets 300 grams of meat or 400 grams of meat and stir-fries it with vegetables. But not every day, because the beef is very expensive. And in the countryside, the cow is an important animal for working. Now we’re starting to learn how to eat beef. In the past we didn’t know.

  “Vietnamese don’t have recipes. When you want to learn something traditional, you have to have good tongue, and to taste it, and you really love the food, and you can balance by yourself. You can get the experience for yourself,” she says. “In Vietnam, you understand, we always make everything with the feeling, more than recipe.”

  Something else I should understand, Duyen insists, is that there are two types of pho in Hanoi. There is a traditional pho, with a darker, not clarified broth; and a less tradi
tional, but very popular, broth that is lighter on spices—especially on the black cardamom, which Duyen particularly dislikes. The first pho I had, at 49 Bat Dan, was one of the dark ones, she explains.

  To be honest, all the pho in Hanoi seem pretty light to me. All are lighter, at least, than anything I’ve ever had. Pho Cuong is another shop that serves a dark broth, according to Duyen. But when I inspect my pho there, the broth looks clear and light. “This bowl is heavy on the black cardamom,” I write in my notebook. Then I add a question mark. “But maybe you are full of shit!” I amend.

  I watch a little kid, maybe five, eating noodles in plain broth with a single egg in it, and wonder if that’s the Vietnamese equivalent of pasta with butter—a plain food that picky kids will eat. Blowing my nose, I lock eyes with a guy who is also blowing his nose.

  What I’ve read is that the pho here in Hanoi is the closest to the very first pho that ever existed (pho might have traveled to Hanoi from nearby Nam Dinh), but it doesn’t strike me as particularly pho-like: its thorough softness and mildness. The pho I’m used to lingers in my clothes and hair, but pho in Hanoi doesn’t do that. The spicing is reserved. The broth is gently sweet. It feels like convalescent food, in a good way. I realize this is like saying your grandpa has your nose—it was his nose first. At first I’m afraid to add things to my bowls, but I learn by example to add garlic and a splash of the vinegar it’s been steeped in for spikiness.

  What comes to mind is a piece published in 2014, in which an American writer, writing for an American food magazine, describing what he sees in American pho shops, declares the correct way to use sriracha in pho: “More times than I can count, I’ve watched people squirt that sriracha all over their beautiful pho. No! Wrong wrong wrong! No!” The comments are varied: there’s bemusement (“I put sriracha in my pho. I love it. You mad?”; vehement agreement (“Yes yes yes a million times yes!”); and utter annoyance (“As a Vietnamese person, I’m surprised I could comprehend words with my eyes rolling as much as they were. The ‘right’ way, ugh.”) In Vietnam, I’m not sure that it would even merit discussion.

  One morning I notice a bustling street setup that looks so appealing I have to stop for my second bowl of breakfast pho. Almost all the stools are taken: women sitting with squeezed purses on their laps, men man-spreading to get low and close to their noodles. The only seat available is a purple-blue stool across from a young woman. We look like we could be friends meeting for a meal, except we can’t actually communicate with each other. I watch as she puts a few spoonfuls of the vinegary red chili sauce directly into her bowl. It’s enough to make her broth change color. It’s a chilly morning; it’s perfect.

  In Saigon, there is blue sky—that’s the first noticeable thing. The second thing is that it’s a full twenty degrees warmer. Where temperatures in Hanoi hovered in the mid-50s and 60s, here in Saigon it’s in the 70s through 90s. Out the window, in the cab navigating Saigon’s wide, filled streets on the way to the hotel, I notice a lady in an orange jumpsuit and red lipstick with a cage of puppies on the back of her scooter. Something I will notice a lot of in Saigon—in contrast to Hanoi’s puffer jackets—are matching patterned shirt-and-pant sets.

  More differences between the cities become immediately apparent. First of all, the stools! It turns out those tiny plastic stools in Hanoi that have grown on (under) me are less ubiquitous—stools here come in a wider range of heights. And actually everything comes in a wider range—more establishments to choose from, more variation in pho from restaurant to restaurant, more options for sit-down restaurants—though there seems, actually, to be less in-the-street pop-up pho, and more partial-street situations: open restaurants with alfresco seating. Saigon’s broths are brown and sweet and don’t seem as virtuous or healthful, with the exception of bean sprouts (blanched) and herbs, which are abundant: not just basil, but sawtooth herb, rice paddy herb, and spicy mint, which are supposed to have various life-giving properties (the sawtooth is for stamina and the basil is good for your sinuses). There are hunks of beef fat floating in one pho, and stewed purple onions and a dense sprinkling of black pepper at Ut Nhung, one of those partial-street restaurants.

  The meat in Saigon is more varied; here there is tendon and tripe in addition to the less colorful cuts found in the North. In one soup, I found a mysterious tubular thing, almost like a soft, white, miniature banana—it turned out to be spinal cord. (It didn’t taste like much.) As on tables in Hanoi, there was fish sauce, pickled garlic, and limes (which appeared regularly in shops aside from 49 Bat Dan, and had a yellower flesh and tasted somehow more savory than California limes), but also hoisin, sriracha-esque hot sauce, and Vietnamese sate sauce. You mix the three together in a condiment dish, and dip your meat into that. In Hanoi there are little red bird’s-eye chilies to steep in your soup; in Saigon there is a profusion of sliced peppers in neon hues of green and yellow and orange and red. I’m told those chili peppers first came from Africa, and appeared on pho tables about ten years ago.

  More than anywhere else I’ve visited on this trip, Pho Phu Huong, on Saigon’s eastern edge, looks a lot like the California pho restaurants I knew growing up: a spacious, newish-looking space with tables and chairs in many different configurations—tables for two, tables for eight. Phung Tran is the restaurant’s proprietor and cook. She wears red lipstick and little glasses; she is stunning at sixty-two. When I ask about her soup, she says the focus of a good broth is its meat and bones—she used to be a beef butcher—not the soup’s spices. She says shops use more spices in a broth if they use fewer bones, and the spices make you feel like the pho is good. She simmers her stock for ten hours. She still finishes her soup with sa sung, dried peanut worm, where a lot of other places no longer do. She also talks a lot about balance, about how various factors can affect your soup, like outside temperature and the quality of the meat, and how the quality of the broth is dependent on the experience of the maker.

  She learned to make pho from the pho makers to whom she would sell her beef, and from her mother-in-law, who started a pho restaurant around 1975. Then came unification, the subsidy period extending to the South, and “pilotless pho.” When I meet Trinh Quang Dung, author of an article titled “100 Years of Pho,” he explains the phrase to me: “During wartime, the American bombers in Hanoi used automatic airplanes, airplanes with no pilots. And at that time in Hanoi, the pho had no pilot. The pho had no meat—some spices, but no meat. Because during the war the meat was very expensive.” There was no incentive to do a good job, he explains, and there wasn’t enough food for everyone.

  Mrs. Tran’s restaurant looked new because it was new. They moved on from their more basic previous rented space, because they were doing a brisk business.

  As it turns out, pho is always a product of place and history, and of people. In America, pho is changing before our eyes, and it makes sense. Pho is a food that’s been defined by adaptation, a food that has always been shifting, because it has had to—it’s had to react to outside influences, to the Vietnamese government’s various five-year plans.

  There are purists, mostly outside of Vietnam, who will insist that pho has to be the way that they have always known it to be. I get it, and I don’t. Not only because the products of change can be so much better than their forebears, but because that’s not what pho has been about.

  Mr. Dung, who’s also a research scientist for the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, a solar-energy specialist, and a teapot collector, divides pho into two types: “handmade” and “industrial.” Industrial pho is all pho made after 1990, with machine-made noodles and gas stoves and modern conveniences—but he described this without any particular animosity. He seemed partial to the traditional pho, but said, matter-of-factly, that it no longer existed; he spoke wistfully about the old Hanoi (“small and romantic”), but lives in Saigon now. What seemed to disappoint him was that people didn’t really know the history of pho any longer—year after year, for Tet, he publishes his “100 Years of Pho
” in the Vietnamese magazine Khoa Hoc Pho Thong. He updates it with details that he learns.

  I think, for the most part, we understand—or are starting to understand—all the ways in which we have been wrong about things. We understand, now, that the Vietnam War, for Vietnam, had less to do with communism and more to do with independence—with Vietnam’s getting out from under French rule and Chinese rule and finally being its own country.

  We understand that there is such a thing as well-meaning, casually racist essentialism. We understand why it’s kind of offensive that, as recently as 2010, Mimi Sheraton wrote, incorrectly, in the Smithsonian magazine, “Pho bo is an unintended legacy of the French, who occupied Vietnam from 1858 to 1954 and who indeed cooked pot au feu, a soup-based combination of vegetables and beef, a meat barely known in Vietnam in those days and, to this day, neither as abundant nor as good as the native pork… But just as North American slaves took the leavings of kitchens to create what we now celebrate as soul food, so the Vietnamese salvaged leftovers from French kitchens and discovered that slow cooking was the best way to extract the most flavor and nourishment from them. They adopted the French word feu, just as they took the name of the French sandwich loaf, pain de mie, for banh mi, a baguette they fill with various greens, spices, herbs, sauces, pork and meatballs.” That pot au feu theory is still repeated, though it’s untrue. The historian Erica J. Peters, in her paper “Defusing Pho,” argues that the French have incorrectly gotten credit for pho: “Pho now stands for a particular colonial relationship between the French and the Vietnamese, an idea that the French brought modern ingenuity to a traditionalist Vietnam.”

  Most of us now know how pho is pronounced (“fuh?” with a question mark at the end). It’s hard to pin down exactly when the correct pronunciation became widespread—people had already been saying it correctly in the seventies, of course, but plenty of others were also saying it incorrectly, in a variety of ways. The New West, in 1978, said it was pronounced “foo.” The New York Times had it a bunch of different ways: in 1995, a Times article instructed readers to pronounce pho “FOE.” And in 2002, Florence Fabricant wrote, “At open-air storefronts people perch on tiny plastic stools to down steaming, restorative bowls of the ubiquitous noodle soup, pho (pronounced feh).” Other magazines were across the board: A 2004 issue of Orange Coast magazine says, “pho (roughly pronounced ‘fuh-uh’),” though they got it right in a 2008 issue; a 2011 issue of San Diego says “pho (pronounced ‘fun’).” And cookbooks and books, like the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Chicken, published in 1999, instructed complete idiots to pronounce pho “far.”