going through pictures on my phone (thanks, i’ll be here all week), this one comes up next. i’ve gotten pho a lot in the past few weeks, usually by myself for lunch. it’s been a good experience for the body and the soul.
thanks to my high school’s open-campus lunches and my asian friends, i was pretty ahead of the curve in discovering the deliciousness that is vietnamese beef noodle soup. every place i’ve been in DC is good—if i were forced to put them in rank order, i’d go: pho 75, pho 14, saigon saigon, and nam viet. but to me they’re all really about equal.
what i notice varying with pho is how people eat it: spoon? ‘sticks? slurp? again thanks to my asian friends growing up and how they taught me, i have a very deliberate method where each bite is individually constructed. first, noodles are grabbed from the soup with chopsticks and raised high up in the air until completely out of the broth. they’re then lowered with a swirling motion into the spoon that’s being held with my left hand, and next some meat is taken from the soup and put on the nested noodles. lastly, chopsticks are used to transfer the sauces (which, as pictured, have been squirted not directly into the broth but rather onto a nearby plate) to top off the perfect little individual bite. repeat 30 or so more times until everything but a pool of broth is gone.
too much work? i don’t think so. not sure where it falls on the spectrum of proper to abnormal method, but it works for me.
