Vietnamese Street Food 101: The all-time favourite Pho

21-Oct-2018, 09:00

21 Oct 2018, 09:00

The soup is light yet full of flavour from long hours of boiling beef bones and the beef tendon is melt-in-your-mouth delicious.

The traditional way is to serve you with way too much vegetables.

The most famous Vietnamese dish outside Vietnam is of course, the Vietnamese beef noodle, or pho (pronounce as “fe-eh”).

This is likely the first dish most people think of when it comes to Vietnamese food, and for good reason – it is accessible, delicious, and uses ingredients familiar with most other cuisines.

Pho Cao Van, at District 1, Ho Chi Minh City.

There are in fact two different types of Pho – one that originates from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, and another from Hanoi, a distance of over 1,100 km away.

While both soup stocks utilise beef and beef bone as its major component, the Southern version also incorporates fish sauce.

Pho from Ho Chi Minh City is the one you usually get, especially outside Vietnam.

Pho Cao Van at Mac Dinh Chi road, however, is one of the few places that serves traditional Northern-style Pho in Saigon.

At 40,000 VND and above per bowl, it is certainly one of the more expensive Pho options out there, but also one of the more “authentic”.

Squeeze the lemon, and dip those beef tendons in the chilli sauce.

A bowl with nothing but beef tendon in it (partly due to a failure in Vietnamese sign language, but no regrets), accompanied by a huge portion of fresh vegetable came to the table.

By the way, there is absolutely no way one can actually finish the entire serving of vegetables.

The soup was light yet full of flavour from long hours of boiling beef bones. The tendon was melt-in-your-mouth delicious. It is not hard to see why this particular shop gets a steady stream of customers despite being rather shabby in appearance and with high prices to boot.