Pho Cali serves up a Vietnamese specialty

By Carrie Caine
Collegian Staff
March 29, 2006

I traveled to Vietnam over last year’s Spring Break and greatly enjoyed the local cuisine. I decided to try out some of the local Vietnamese restaurants and found myself at Pho Cali in Chinatown.

Pho is a traditional Vietnamese noodle soup made with rice noodles in a beef broth. This restaurant offers a variety of different kinds of pho, prepared with beef, tripe, pork and all kinds of other options. I opted for the deluxe house pho, which came with everything imaginable. As an appetizer, I chose spring rolls and chicken over broken rice. The beverage list included a variety of bubble teas and black coffees, both Vietnamese specialties.

The service was pretty disinterested in our presence. While we ordered, the waiter started gazing out the window without actually writing down what we were saying, leaving me questioning whether we were ordering wrong and should just stop talking or if there was a flaming cart hurtling down Arch Street.

The waiter left with our order and returned almost immediately with a dish of raw bean sprouts and what looked like a large bay leaf on top. Having no idea what to do with this, I wondered if it was perhaps a salad, but the speedy arrival of the spring rolls suspended the bean sprout question for a few minutes. Spring rolls are particularly delicious in Vietnam, with the thinnest and crispiest crust imaginable. The filling of these spring rolls was a strange pink mashed meat and vegetables and was appealing to neither the eyes or the palate.

This left the question of the bean sprouts in front of me. After trying unsuccessfully to flag down a server for a few minutes, I tentatively tasted a raw sprout and discovered that it was okay, but I really hoped I wasn’t supposed to eat the whole plate of them raw. Luckily, a waitress saw me eating a raw sprout and came over to tell me that the whole plate was supposed to go in the pho when it came out in what was probably one of the most awkward server-diner moments ever.

The pho arrived in an absolutely enormous bowl, filled with all kinds of meats and vegetables before I even packed in the bean sprouts. I used the chopsticks and Asian-style spoon and got to eating the soup, an involved and messy process of pulling out the long rice noodles and arranging them in the wide spoon before picking them up with the chopsticks again and slurping them down in the least offensive manner possible. This is not the restaurant for any kind of conversation, as most focus must be on eating this tasty but seemingly unattainable soup.

My chicken over broken rice was fortunately unnecessary, as the soup I had ordered was plentiful enough to serve at least two people. The chicken itself was dry and the rice bland except for where it had hints of chicken broth, but the pho was interesting and flavorful enough to rescue the meal.

While I paid for the meal, I noticed that the girls adjacent to our table, though they had been to Pho Cali before and spoke some Vietnamese to their waitress, also had no idea what to do with the bean sprouts. I thus recommend that if you truly want delicious Vietnamese food, you should probably just hop on a plane and go for the original.

cainec1@lasalle.edu