Greatest pho ever: I ate the best of Vietnamese food in 48 hours

It’s 7am in southern Vietnam, the air cool and crisp as Ho Chi Minh City awakes and thinks about what to eat. And it thinks about pho.

It just doesn’t get any more satisfying than this, sitting at a rickety table amid early-morning Ho Chi Minh City crowds, the smell of scooter exhaust almost entirely masked by the scent of ripped basil leaves and the deeply complex beef broth right before you.

When Ho Chi Minh City’s people awake, their thoughts turn to pho. Credit: Alamy

I’ve eaten a lot of pho. This Vietnamese noodle soup, named for its thick rice noodles, banh pho, is so perfectly balanced, its broth flavoured with herbs and aromatics, its noodles slippery and chewy, with just-cooked beef, crunchy bean sprouts, thin-sliced onion, fresh basil and saw-tooth coriander. I know pho. I love pho.

And this pho is the best I’ve ever had.

The restaurant is Phu Vuong Pho, not exactly Ho Chi Minh City’s most basic purveyor of noodle soup, but certainly not its fanciest. The tables are made of thin sheet metal, the seats plastic, the service brusque. And the soup is astonishingly, transcendentally good.

Bo lat lot: sweet, sour, savoury and smoky.Credit: iStock

There is no better way to start a day. This is my second morning of an express culinary adventure in Ho Chi Minh. I have a little under 48 hours in the city before I’m jumping on a river cruise to Phnom Penh, and I plan to eat as many of the foodie delights available here as humanly possible. And that’s a lot. This is a city that has some of the best food you’ll ever eat and which costs little more than a few dollars, and with portion sizes that are relatively modest … well, let’s see.

I arrive in the city one evening with just enough time to check into my hotel, Fusion Original Saigon Centre, and then hit the busy pavements headed for Quan An Co Lieng in District Three.

This is a classic, no-frills Saigon eatery, a shop with a charcoal grill, a glass display case out front and basic table settings in the cramped interior. The specialty is bo la lot, spiced ground beef wrapped in lolot leaves and grilled, served with herbs, pickled vegetables and rice-paper sheets.

The result is sweet, sour, savoury and smoky, the perfect introduction to Vietnamese cuisine, and also the sort of dainty portion that leaves room for something else. A second dinner. Something like banh mi?

Banh mi: a Vietnamese classic.Credit: iStock

Fortunately, Banh Mi Huynh Hoa is just down the road. Here I order the classic pork roll, a baguette filled with pate, mayonnaise, various slices of cured pork, pickled daikon and carrot, and the shop’s signature pork floss, an absolute umami bomb that works nicely as my quasi-dessert.

Ca phe sua da. The second-best way to start a day.Credit: iStock

The next morning I’m straight back at it with a 6am stroll to Trung Nguyen Legend, a nearby cafe, for ca phe sua da, or Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk and ice. The second-best way to start a day.

Back at the hotel, the restaurant buffet features beef pho made fresh and tasty, a perfect-sized bowl filled with everything you could hope for at a street-level restaurant, only this one served 24 storeys up.

Of course, Vietnamese noodle soup doesn’t begin and end with pho. Cut to a few hours later and I’m in an industrial, exhaust-smudged section of District One, where Nguyen Canh Chan does a bustling trade in bun rieu.

This isn’t soup for the faint of heart: its base is made with tomatoes and small freshwater crabs, with thin rice noodles, crab cakes, hunks of pork meat and pork rind, shredded banana flower, fresh herbs and a cake of congealed pig’s blood perched atop. I’m definitely awake now.

Traditional bun rieu noodle soup isn’t for the faint of heart.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Dinner later is yet more noodle soup, this time banh canh cua, a thick crab-based soup with chewy tapioca noodles, at Banh Canh Cua 87 in District One.

And then finally the next day, the greatest pho of my life. I’ll go on to have one more meal, a dish of banh cuon, or steamed rice sheets with shrimp and pork, before I dash out of the city, but it’s the pho that will stay with me forever, the one I will always be chasing. Breakfast will never be the same.

The details

Fly
Vietnam Airlines flies direct from both Melbourne and Sydney to Ho Chi Minh City. See vietnamairlines.com

Stay
Fusion Original Saigon Centre is a smart, modern new hotel in the heart of the city, with spacious rooms from $257 a night. See saigoncentre.fusionoriginals.com

Dine
The restaurants visited don’t have English websites and don’t take bookings. Simply walk up and take a seat. Phu Vuong Pho, Quan An Co Lieng, Banh Mi Huynh Hoa, and Bun Rieu Nguyen Canh Chan are open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner; Banh Canh Cua 87 is open daily for lunch and dinner.

The writer travelled courtesy of Aqua Expeditions.