Jan. 08, 2008 - Issue #638: Come out, Comrade
Exotic delicacies are absolutely Phobulous
At 19, while living in Calgary, a friend introduced me to pho (pronounced “fuh”): a staple of Vietnamese menus, it’s a beef noodle soup served in a bowl the size and approximate shape of your average wok. We’d go to a little dive tucked away in a Chinatown strip mall and for half an hour, that bowl was the whole world. Our eyes watered, our noses ran and our tongues prickled with exotic spices. Ten years later, pho is still one of my favourite comfort foods.
Unlike the old dives I used to frequent, the atmosphere at Phobulous exudes new Asian cool. Bleached wood panelling, expensive artwork in thick black frames and large bamboo pots give the room a bright, spacious feel despite being relatively narrow.
I already knew I had to try the pho, but when I opened the menu, I goggled over an unexpected array of Vietnamese delicacies, each with their origins described in intricate detail. For instance, white ear fungus—historically reserved for Vietnamese royalty—is a tree fungus that is dried out and then served like a crisp chip. The most interesting, though, was the weasel coffee, made from coffee beans regurgitated by wild weasels living in the Vietnam highlands: their stomach juices remove some of the acidity from the regurgitated beans.
Delicacies aside, Pho is a dish best shared with friends, and with all the choices stretched before us, I was thankful I’d invited a friend with an equally adventurous palate. We started simply with salad rolls ($7.50), and then went exotic. We ordered the lotus root salad, which contained the white ear fungus ($8.95); the Mother Pho, with the tripe ($8.95); a vermicelli dish with grilled beef, prawns and spring rolls ($9.25); and for desert, of course, we had the weasel coffee ($5.25 a glass) and fried bananas with ice cream ($4.75). To accentuate our main courses, we selected a bottle of Asian Moonlight Pear sake ($16.95).
Good Asian dining is as much about process as taste. To truly appreciate the experience, you must be patient and immerse yourself in it. There’s no quick, MSG-laden substitute for a rich, well-paced meal in good company. So we sipped flavourless, hot green tea ($2) and waited.
First came the salad rolls. They had a rainforest taste to them, juicy and minty contrasting with earthy pork and subtle shrimp. The portions were so large we hadn’t finished when our lotus root salad arrived. The salad was light and fresh, with crunchy lotus root, carrot, daikon radish, pork slivers and shrimp infused with basil and lime. As we dug in with our chopsticks, we both felt transported to a warm summer day. Just then the sake arrived to complete the sensation, leading off with a spicy pear head and a faint aftertaste of banana. Although a little too sweet for mass consumption, it cleansed the palate nicely.
By this time, our appetizers and salads had piqued our taste for the main course. The pho, the tantalizing dish we’d been waiting for, came out steaming. The process was working; we were ready to sink our teeth into the heartier flavours of the soup. The Mother Pho didn’t disappoint. The meat was soft and well cooked, and with charitable helpings of hot chilli sauce and hoisin the soup steamed with the eye-watering spiciness I remembered from other soup sojourns. The mists immersed us in their bewitching aura.
The vermicelli dish got the least attention. It wasn’t that it didn’t taste good, it just wasn’t as seductive as the rest, and we had plenty to work on between the appetizers, salad, soup and sake. (A single, massive bowl of pho is usually more than enough for one.) Instead, we focused on the soup, amusing ourselves by digging out the long, textured strands of tripe. The taste was akin to squid, as was the texture. We also marvelled at the white ear fungus, which actually looked like ears and had a starchy consistency.
Soon we could see the bottom of our bowls and our stomachs were sending signals to our brains. We set aside our feast, but we weren’t finished yet. It was time for weasel coffee ($5.25 a glass), and since we were having coffee, we decided to share dessert, as well. This turned out to be one of our best decisions—fried bananas and ice cream drizzled in chocolate sauce ($4.75).
The coffee came Vietnamese style, with condensed milk and a filter atop the glass. Before mixing in the condensed milk, I sipped some of the coffee black. It was rich and flavourful, but had none of the acidity of regular coffee, certainly a delicacy to experience. As a coffee snob who likes it the blacker the better, I preferred the first sips prior to mixing in the milk. But it was still good over ice, if sweet.
As we set down our chopsticks the world around us came back into focus. We’d held out until almost closing time and our server was leaning on the bar. She deflected our apologies and patiently answered my questions about the local artist, Wei Wong, whose collection of artistic photographs—rippling water and river grass with psychedelic hints of reflecting light—were blown up in large frames on the wall.
Within minutes of paying our $68.85 bill and leaving, the lights inside were off. We returned from our pho oasis into a wintry reality, but luckily the hot soup was still warming our insides. V
Mon - Sat, 11 am - 10 pm
Sun, 11 am - 9 pm
Phobulous
8701 - 109 St, 988.2696
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