Pho Hoa | Health Concious Choice

Excerpt from Newspaper reviews BRING ME MO' PHO Discover a universe-in-a-bowl at local Vietnamese eateries where the noodle soup is within you and without you by Alison Cook, The Houston Chronicle Here what's interests me about pho: customizing and consuming this Vietnamese noodle soup is eating as a full-contact sport. Pho is not something you undertake on a first date, or with a client you are trying to impress, or wearing clothes labeled "Dry Clean Only." One look at the pho devotees in the numerous soup joints that have sprung up around town will tell you why. The experts will be hunched over their bowls chopsticking ungainly ropes of noodles into their mouths and sucking them up with varying degrees of discretion. The novices will be gamely struggling as errant noodle strands lash them with flying droplets before collapsing messily back into the beef broth. Every last soul will be wholly engaged with the food, for pho demands nothing less. That is precisely its charm. I like doctoring the stuff until I achieve the optimum effect: brightened with squeezes of lime or lemon; charged with tiny cartwheels of jalapeno; crackling with bean sprouts; herbed with mint or basil from the plate of greenery that comes alongside. Not only do I end up with a universe in a bowl -- salad, pasta, meat, soup, a kaleidoscope of texture and flavor -- it is a universe of my own making. What, in this narcissistic age, could be more gratifying? Like a lot of Houstonians, I began my pho career at Kim Son, back before it was reincarnated as a colossal Vietnamese temple of commerce. At first I ordered the basic pbo tai (a version stocked with wafery eye-of-round slices flash-cooked by the broth) as a self-defense against the encyclopedic and bewildering menu. Then I simply got hooked. I would crave a pho fix when I felt peckish or in need of a shot of virtue, and I found the soup as much a tonic in hot weather as in cold. Now, in my latter pho phase, I believe that the soup is best consumed in one of the storefront shops devoted to pho in all its permutations. Check under "pho" in the business pages, right before the phobia clinic listings, to get a sense of the possibilities. I have gravitated to a pair of dueling pho restaurants just two blocks apart in Little Saigon, south of downtown. PHO CONG LY at Travis and McGowen is big and slick; PHO TAU BAY at Travis and Drew is small and homey. Both of them dispense very respectable bowls of soup and delicious slices of Houston life. They're blissfully cheap, too -- it's hard to spend more than five or six bucks at either place. Pho Cong Ly, which occupies an expansive corner of the Cong Tranh Mall, has an almost yuppie-ish aroma to it. The young staff is Gappily clad in pale aqua T-shirts. The clientele is peppered with upwardly mobile Vietnamese youth sporting swell haircuts and bandbox sportswear. As befits a would-be chain (there's a Veterans Memorial Drive location, too), Pho Cong Ly's laminated menu tries hard to be American-friendly. It bristles with such effusive marketing prose as "Vietnamese Noodle Soup... Tasting nutritious food in a very delicious way!" and that irresistible '90s come-on, "The Health-Conscious Choice!" It coaxes the novice with a section-heading that benignly suggests, "A Little Bit of Fat?" That's a tactful way of introducing what for many westerners is a sticking point: the fact that most of the variants dear to Vietnamese pho connoisseurs involve cuts of becf that are fatty or disconcertingly exotic, from fat brisket to soft tendon to the poetic-sounding bible tripe. "A slight fat covering ... makes them tastier than you can imagine," encourages the menu. Alas, my cultural squeamishness is not so easily overcome. I hate to think of myself as a gastronomic wimp; I am, after all, a woman who as a matter of honor once ate a fish eyeball, and who just last month dined on a nice plate of brains and kidneys. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and I draw it at ingesting ribbons of solid white animal fat, tasty though they may be. My experiments with the wilder forms of pho have yet to convert me (indeed, Pho Cong Ly's innocent sounding meatballs have all the charm of artgum erasers). So I stick to my tried-and-true pho tai with its irreproachably lean eye of round, even though the menu makes clear that this is a pusillanimous choice "For the Beginners." I measure pho by the-quality of the beef broth and the freshness of the accompanying pile of vegetation, and Pho Cong Ly passes muster on both counts -- although on occasion the bean sprouts look a bit weary at their tail ends. The beef broth, with its rich brown tint and its cargo of scallion, cilantro and red onion, has genuine character; those tiny golden beads of grease are well within the realm of acceptability. The rice noodles tend to the skinny rather than the broad and flat, and the eye, of round arrives pink in the middle, the way it should be. With this foundation steaming in front of you, you embark upon the pho ritual. A big handful of bean sprouts goes in, then a couple of jalapeno slices to infuse the broth while you deliberate over the day's selection of herbs, some of them alien-looking. Taste before you add: the long, serrated, fat-ish leaves are a pungent acquired taste; the flowering sprigs of heady Thai basil are not. At this point I'm done, although some patrons add sesame oil or the hot, reddish Sriracha sauce that is the Thai analog to ketchup. Now comes the tricky part. Convey the solids to your mouth with chopsticks, casting aside your inhibitions: survey your fellow diners -- that skinny old guy in the topsiders, that young family on a grocery-shopping break -- for pointers on technique. Drink the broth with your squatty little spoon. Drink in the restaurant's Vietnamese New Age muzak, punctuated by loud bursts of intergalactic action-hero noise every time the door opens into the adjacent video-arcaded mall hallway, where little boys play "Mortal Kombat." Order a summery da chanh, the simple Vietnamese lemonade that comes garnished with a thin slice of lime. Court hyperactivity by finishing off with a maniacally intense ca the sea da, the iced French drip coffee sweetened with condensed milk. Contemplate the surprising view of downtown (including a very nifty auto body shop) and be thankful you live in Houston.