The Pho' Report Part One- The Friendliness vs. Quality theory

The Pho’ Report: In which I set out to review every Pho restaurant in the bay area (well really San Francisco and the East Bay)

Part One- The Friendliness vs. Quality theory

Pho’ Hoa - This small fast food looking place semi-chain in downtown berkeley was where I first fell in love with Pho’. I’d always liked Asian noodle soups but never really understood all the hubbub over this particular one until one rainy afternoon last year when I ducked in here after buying comic books.

I can’t really explain what happened. It was cold out so I figured soup would be good. This was the nearest place so I figured “what the hell”? I ordered the basic Pho’ Tai (vermicelli noodle soup with rare beef) and sat back with my comics. Sometime mid-meal a switch flipped in my brain. Afterwords I found myself craving Pho’ for nearly every meal.

So now a year later as I set out to write a bit about all the Pho’ I’ve eaten I figure this is the perfect place to start.

The Pho’ here could be describes as average but I tend to think of it like this:

Pho is a food for which there is only so much you can do. It has a sort of glass ceiling but one too many places either can’t manage to reach or try too hard to break through. There is an ideal thing that you want when you order Pho. The noodles must be cooked just right, the beef must be sliced right and rare (or raw), the garnishes should be fresh and most importantly the broth should be simple but still extremely deep in flavor. Get all this right and you’ve satisfied most Pho eaters. This one for sure.

Too many places try and do too much with their Pho. This is not one of those places. Pho Hao manages to give you exactly what you crave when you order Pho’. Their simple noodle soup has sublime perfection to it. There’s something so great about getting exactly what you want when you want it.

On another note the people who work here range from completely uninterested in you too downright hostile. This is a central part of my “friendliness vs. quality” theory that I’ll talk about more in the next review.

7 - Mission - The people working at this tiny little Vietnamese place (on 7th at Mission of course) are beyond nice. Not only where they extremely pleasant with me they were patient above and beyond the pale of duty with, not just one but, all three crazy people who wandered in while I was eating.

Unfortunately their attitude did nothing for the Pho’ which is what I’m primarily interested in. The noodles where overdone and chewy which was bad enough but beyond that there was something seriously wrong with the broth. It took me a few minutes to put a finger on what was so familiar about the rather bad soup. Finally I realized it had the distinct taste of Top Ramen flavor packets. Could this really be how they made it???

My experience here combined with all my former experiences at Pho’ Hoa was what led me eventually to the following theory about Pho’ restaurants:

“Quality of the Pho’ gets worse in direct proportion to how nice the people are serving it”.

Top Ramen Packets????