The purist’s guide to phở in Hanoi

Hanoi street scene, early 1940s. Photograph by Harrison Forman.“To live in this world and not eat phở is foolish.When the time comes to leave it,one must surely offer phở as an offering.So come, taste it now – lest you long for it later.”— Tú MỡHERE IS THE BEEF. THERE ARE THE NOODLES. Over it all – two ladles of clear, piping-hot broth, then a scattering of scallions. A twist of pepper, perhaps a squeeze of lime.And that is all.To a newcomer, phở can appear deceptively simple.Vũ Bằng – one of the great chroniclers of Hanoi’s culinary world and a true Purist – even described phở as a basic dish.“Why call it basic?” he asked. “Because it is true.”This did not mean he underestimated the craft of the phở maker. On the contrary, Vũ Bằng knew better than anyone the instinctive culinary skill required to produce a proper (if not perfect) bowl.Nowadays, eating phở has become something of a rite of passage for those who arrive in Hanoi – whether for a fleeting visit, a few years, or the foreseeable future. It is a box that has to be ticked along with drinking egg coffee and trying to get run over by a locomotive while holding a selfie-stick. Some leave underwhelmed by phở. Others may even claim to have eaten better bowls in Orange County, Houston, Footscray, Cabramatta, or even an airport terminal…The Purist does not rush to make a rebuttal on the internet. That would be most inelegant – everyone is free to have their own (very questionable) opinion. At the same time, the Purist concedes that not every bowl served in the capital deserves celebration. Market forces being what they are, purveyors of average phở have sadly multiplied.“Thus, phở is not only a dish, not only a delight for the senses,” as the esteemed Vũ Bằng once opined, “but also a problem: the problem of eating phở…”What follows, therefore, is a guide to phở in Hanoi.Not a guide that lists recommended restaurants – how patronising!

No one needs to have their hand held when navigating a new city, even in Hanoi, where patience and persistence will be (if you pass the test) rewarded with epiphany.Furthermore, the Purist knows that proclaiming any single shop to have the “best phở” could trigger disastrous consequences. He or she has witnessed what a single YouTube video, television crew or – worse yet – a Michelin recommendation can do to a favourite venue for any kind of Hanoi delicacy. The delicate ecosystem of a restaurant or humble stall is altered overnight, and the genie can never be coaxed back into the bottle.Instead, we might see this guide as a small manifesto for the uninitiated – an attempt to explain how the purists of Hanoi think about phở, and where their enduring devotion comes from.The essayist Thạch Lam – author of the beloved classic Hà Nội Băm Sáu Phố Phường (Hanoi’s Thirty-Six Streets) – once declared: “Phở is a special delicacy of Hanoi. It is not unique to Hanoi – but only in Hanoi does it taste truly good.” Now, before anyone combusts on the internet, it should be remembered that Thạch Lam died in 1942 – long before phở became a global obsession, or even before it had travelled south in any significant way.Today even a proud Hanoian purist might blush when reading those words.Then again, if you were told you could have only one more bowl of phở in your life – a bowl where every detail is exactly right: a generous tuft of noodles, soft and delicate; the meat tender; the broth clear and gently sweet, touched with a hint of ginger and the faintest whisper of fish sauce – your thoughts would surely drift, sooner or later, back to Hanoi.“The discovery of a new dish contributes more to human happiness than that of a new star.” — Jean Anthelme Brilliat Savarin: “Many foreigners become so enamoured of phở that they unconsciously become its devoted followers,” writes Trịnh Quang Dũng in his essay 100 Năm Phở Việt (One Hundred Years of Vietnamese Phở). “Most of them soon want to know where phở came from and how old it is – questions that even many Vietnamese themselves cannot answer clearly.

”Ah yes – the burning question: where, exactly, did phở spring from?Alas, the origins of phở have been debated endlessly without any final conclusion, though Mr Dũng does an admirable job threading his way through what others have described as a ‘murky history’.Some scholars trained in classical Chinese learning claim that phở originated in China from a Cantonese dish called ngưu nhục phấn – beef rice noodles. According to this theory, the word phở is simply a corrupted pronunciation of phấn.Mr Dũng is, however, skeptical. Ngưu nhục phấn has existed for a very long time, he notes, yet it remains confined to the place where it was born. It has never achieved the fame – or the geographical spread – of Vietnamese phở. More importantly, the two dishes differ both technically and gastronomically: instead of the delicate rice sheets that become phở noodles, the Chinese dish uses something closer to thick rice dough resembling Vietnamese bánh canh.Another theory – gleefully peddled by Frenchmen at diplomatic soirées – proposes that phở derives from the French word feu, meaning “fire,” as in pot-au-feu. This theory left Mr Dũng, for one, a little flummoxed, since pot-au-feu is a rustic stew of beef simmered with vegetables such as carrots, leeks, and turnips.The argument perhaps has a certain linguistic charm – feu morphing into phở. But are we to believe that early twentieth-century colonials were wandering the streets and pointing at things like enthusiastic toddlers – feu! lumière! chien! – to such an extent that Vietnamese copied their phrasing?No, no, non.What these theories really reveal is something else entirely. Vietnam, once again, finds itself placed between two empires – and phở ends up being assigned to foreign parents.Countering those narratives, and drawing on folk memory and early twentieth-century records, Vietnamese scholars suggest that phở evolved from a rustic dish called xáo trâu – a buffalo stew sold along the docks of the Red River in the early 1900s.At the time, Vietnamese people ate very little beef. In late nineteenth-century Hanoi only a handful of stalls sold it, and they often struggled to sell their stock. Beef bones were practically worthless. Meanwhile the riverfront was growing busy.

Around 1908–09, steamship routes connected Hanoi with cities such as Hải Phòng and Nam Định. Chinese labourers from Yunnan worked the ships. Boats from Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An arrived carrying fish sauce and dried goods. Some historians also point to the villages around Nam Định – particularly Vân Cù – where families are said to have refined the early form of phở before many vendors later carried the trade to Hanoi.At this stage, the Red River docks were a lively commercial centre – and where there is labour, there must be food. Street vendors carrying shoulder baskets soon flocked to the riverbanks selling a noodle soup made with the buffalo stew.Because beef was difficult to sell and bones were often given away for free, some vendors began adding them to the pot. Gradually the beef stew took over. Before long the new dish spread along the riverbanks from Ô Quan Chưởng down to Hàng Mắm Street. Chinese labourers in the area also joined the trade, and the French scholar Henri Oger even recorded an image of a roaming phở vendor in his famous ethnographic work Technique du peuple annamite (1908–1909).From those river docks – carried on the shoulders of wandering vendors – phở gánh (mobile pho) slowly spread through the alleys of Hanoi and then to other cities.And, eventually, to airport terminals.At least, this is the leading theory. Until someone invents a time machine, the Purist is satisfied with it – and is now sufficiently hungry to discuss how, and why, you should eat phở in Hanoi.“Phở is profoundly a dish of the people.”— Nguyễn TuânAs you may have gathered from the brief history, phở is not a luxurious dish. Therefore, the Purist instinctively turns his nose up at costly ingredients and flagrant decadence.Some fifteen years ago, a fashionable restaurant near the Hanoi Opera House unveiled what it proudly proclaimed to be the world’s first Kobe-beef phở. A bowl cost an astonishing $35 – roughly thirty-five times the ordinary price at the time. The stunt was about as convincing as a lazy circus trick: a gimmick designed to attract attention. In an effort to be luxurious, it was merely boorish.

It succeeded, at least, in inspiring a rather sniffy article by the BBC that dryly mocked the spectacle of luxury in communist Vietnam.Elsewhere in Vietnam, edible gold leaf – a tasteless material – along with a cut of A5 Wagyu found its way into a bowl that cost a mind-melting $161. Alas, people are free to burn their money as they please – in most societies, at least. But phở, at its heart, is a soup born from simplicity. It is the opposite of lavish. It requires no prime cuts of anything – certainly not Kobe, and certainly not marbled Wagyu.In foreign lands, where phở is found but not always understood, a Vietnamese restaurateur may feel the need to lure in carnivorous Europeans by advertising “phở with 150 grams of sirloin steak.” Even this will make the Purist shed a quiet tear and think of home – where a few modest slices of beef are entirely sufficient.In truth, phở needs very little. Chín (well-done brisket), nạm (flank), or gầu (fatty brisket) are more than enough. The Purist will happily take any of these, even before tái, the slices of rare beef that so often dominate modern bowls.The writer Nguyễn Tuân, in his celebrated essay simply titled “Phở,” reminded readers that the dish is built upon xương xẩu – literally “bones and scraps.” The word xẩu, he observed after speaking with a vendor, is not quite the same as xương. It refers specifically to those broth bones with stubborn shreds of meat and tendon still clinging to them.In Nguyễn Tuân’s day, rickshaw pullers would sometimes step into a phở shop and order a cup of rice wine alongside a bowl of these xẩu bones. A humble pleasure – yet perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the dish.For a Purist such as Nguyễn Tuân, the height of luxury would have been mỡ gầu – that precious cut whose marbled fat is neither greasy nor heavy, firm like wax yet tender – or perhaps a cánh gầu, a “wing” of brisket.And if the Purist chooses tái, he will accept it only if the meat is so fresh it seems almost to twitch beneath the knife.