I realized how much I missed the lovely street dwellers of the Tenderloin, so I headed back in that direction to Little Saigon for #42 on my list: Phở gà at Turtle Tower.
I am one of the biggest phở (pronounced fuh?) snobs on the face of this planet. After eating this noodle soup for breakfast lunch and dinner for four months straight in southern Vietnam, and after reading books on phở, and learning the correct way to eat phở from Vietnamese van drivers, I take great pride in eating authentic phở. I also take great pains in observing (as my companion at Turtle Tower calls it) “white” phở, or western phở, or just really freaking bad phở.
Before arriving at the restaurant, I was already judging the phở I would soon be eating:
Point #1: Turtle Tower has a website. Bad sign. Any Vietnamese restaurant fancy enough to have their own website can’t be authentic. A yelp review is fine. Anything more than that is a little “white.”
Point #2: The chef is Vietnamese. Good sign! He’s not Chinese or Japanese or Korean. Just because a chef has squinty eyes and jet black hair does not make him or her capable of making great phở.
Point #3: The fact that the soup I’m supposed to eat is phở gà, or chicken phở, is just a little bogus. I’ve always found beef phở to not only be more authentic, but to be ever more delicious.
After making these judgments, it was time to gain first-hand phở experience and actually eat the freaking thing. Biking into little Saigon was like walking into a kitchen in Vietnam; the smells overwhelmed me and brought me home. When I arrived at the restaurant with my companion, I was relieved to see that point #1 would in fact not be an issue. The restaurant was a sparsely decorated white room with bad lighting packed with people, most of whom were Vietnamese, leaning over white plastic bowls of noodle soup with green plastic chop sticks in hand.
When I told the “front of house” woman in Vietnamese that we would be two people, without blinking at the fact that a crazy white girl was speaking her rare language, she replied back which table was ours. A Vietnamese waitress speaking Vietnamese… another good sign.
My companion ordered phở tái (my personal favorite) which is phở with rare thinly sliced beef, and I of course ordered phở gà. There was nothing “white” about our phở. The meat had not been sliced on an expensive “white person” meat slicer; it looked as though it had been hacked with an ax. My chicken pieces still had the pimply skin and perhaps a few tendons here and there. My friend’s grisly beef was still red raw inside, until she dunked it into her hot broth.
The noodles were incredible. They were slick as wet worms, and not at all mushy. When I found a noodle that looked like a flat worm regenerating, I knew that these noodles were house-made, a great feat for a small restaurant.
The broth is very northern style, which was something for me to get used to. I lived with southern style broth where the five spices (typically star anise, cinnamon, ginger, clove and coriander) hit you in the face, and there are still more herbs, spices, and condiments to be added at one’s leisure. Northern style broth is much more subtle. Northerners also truly believe in phở for phở’s sake. They don’t add those extra herbs and greens… it takes away from the experience.
Although I loved my phở gà, I did feel like I was eating mom’s chicken noodle soup and not necessarily a bowl of hit-me-over-the-head phở. Perhaps this is why the westerners of San Francisco choosing the bucket list voted for a dish more comprehensible to them. I would next time order the soup with the darker broth and the beef shaved right off the cow. That, to me, is true Vietnam.
When I left the restaurant, a Vietnamese man was sitting alone leaning over his steaming bowl of soup, drinking the broth with his spoon in his left hand, and chop-sticking the noodles with his right. All of his concentration was on this food in front of him. Every noodle that he placed between his lips was gone in a split second with the loudest, most obnoxious slirp. For a minute, I forgot I was in the U.S.
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