Charles Phan

Charles Phan · Vietnamese Home Cooking

I eat pho - chicken or beef - almost every morning at the restaurant. It's also the first thing I eat when I go back to Vietnam. My family left Vietnam when I was twelve years old, and eighteen years passed before I returned. On my first trip back, I landed in Ho Chi Minh City in the morning from an overnight flight. It was disorienting to disembark from the plane into the humid day, stepping into a country that was both intensely familiar and also a distant memory. I went straight to a coffee shop, a noisy shoebox of a space where men were talking over coffee and the owner was dispensing bowl after bowl of pho. I was back in Vietnam. Bowls of pho are the hamburgers of Vietnam: incredibly popular, eaten every day by a majority of the population, young and old. In the mornings in Ho Chi Minh City, you see commuters sitting astride their parked mopeds, slurping down a bowl before they continue on to work. Every pho place serves the soup with a plate of garnishes: rau ram, mint, Thai ba