Six Don't-Miss Vietnamese Noodle Soups
A collection of distinct options to try around NYC
Vietnamese cooks are masters of full-meal soups, giant bowls brimming with long-simmered broths teeming with ingredients. Sure, everyone knows about pho bo — the formal name of the beef soup with rice noodles that first appeared here in the 1980s at places like Pho Pasteur on Baxter Street. Today, it’s the soup that’s found in nearly every neighborhood in town. It represents a Saigon take on the soup, with a stout broth, multiple beef options, perhaps a little sugar, and an arsenal of herbs, sprouts, and sauces that can be added.
Almost a decade ago, a Hanoi-style of pho became popular, sometimes known as pho bac. The broth is thinner, the noodles thicker, the types of beef thrown in often limited to one or two, presented with few accompaniments — more elegant and austere.
But there are other soups, far less common on city Vietnamese menus, that you should know about … and try. Collectively, these currently represent one of the city’s better meal deals. Here are six soups — including both variations of pho — and a favorite place to find each one.
Pho Bo
This complicated version of the soup has dominated city Vietnamese menus for forty years. Many of its Saigon-leaning proponents actually have “pho” in the name. Pho Grand at 277 Grand Street in Chinatown offers a classic version, with a choice of multiple sauces, meats, and offal, but I’m going to recommend the more studied version at Banh ($16.95), at 942 Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, with its delicate noodles and heartier hunks of beef.
Pho Bac
The sparer pho associated with the north and Hanoi specifically — where pho was said to have been invented — was introduced at Hanoi House, where it is still exemplary, but my favorite version lately is found at La Dong, at 11 East 17th Street, Union Square and called pho Ha Noi ($21) . The only accompaniments are pickled garlic and minced red chiles, and the uber-beefy soup is the sole of simplicity, with noodles wider and more fragrant than most.
Pho Ga
When I was assigned a story on Vietnamese restaurants in Houston for Lucky Peach a few years back, I found 60 or so places that specialized in pho. Of these, three focused on pho ga, the chicken variation on the soup. It is apparently popular now in Hanoi, due to the high cost of beef. We eventually acquired our own chicken pho specialist late last summer at Pho Ga Vang at 30 Market Street, Chinatown. Chopped chicken pho will set you back $14.99, and for an extra fee depending on availability, you can have the giblets thrown in, too, the way they do it in Houston. It is served with a heart-shaped receptacle of a black pepper vinegar.
Bun Bo Hue
This soup is as different from pho as night from day, with a dark brown broth, an assortment of meats, often including brisket and cha lua (steamed pork roll), and an inherent spiciness — in many ways the richest of Southeast Asian soups. It originates, not in Ho Chi Minh City or in Hanoi, but in the port city of Hue (pronounced “whey”) in the middle of the slender country. The flavor of the broth is amped up with lemongrass and shrimp paste, and the rice noodles — which sometimes seem almost an afterthought — are very much like Yunnan mixian, white, round, and soft. Find it ($28) at Di An Di, at 68 Greenpoint Avenue in Greenpoint.
Canh Chua
Originating in the Mekong Delta southwest of Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), canh chua (“sour soup”) is the most unusual of Vietnamese soups. At Sao Mai, 203 First Avenue, the longest running of the East Village Vietnamese restaurants, the classic soup ($15) boasts a broth based on tamarind, with added pineapple, shrimp, tomatoes, and bac ha — an elephant-ear pond weed valued for its thick stem. The flavors of the soup, sweet and tart, represent an unexpected combination in Vietnamese food.
Bun Rieu
Find this enticing crab noodle soup ($19), also associated with the Mekong Delta, at Non La, 128 East 4th Street in the East Village. The broth is tomatoey, the rice noodles round of circumference and soft, and the soup filled with spongy crab cake in big rectangular hunks, bone-in pork for extra flavor, fried cubes of tofu, cha lua, beef tendon, and long stems of spring onion, for a cavalcade of powerful flavors, with no holds barred.
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