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The Art of eating pho soup
Alexander Greely
Helene Sze McCarthy, a native of Hai Phong in North Vietnam and resident of Silver Spring, Md., took the writer to PHO Pasteur Vietnamese Restaurant for a taste of the owner’s soup.
McCarthy says pho is really like an art form - one Vietnamese writer even likens the pho presentation ( soup, condiments and platter of accompaniments) to a Cubist painting. So it makes sense to think of eating pho as an artistic accomplishment.
“The soup is a delicate food, and you have only one bowl of soup at each meal, so you must learn to enjoy the whole thing”, says McCarthy, Vice President of the Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association of the Greater Washington Area.
Watching others eating pho, it would seem that anything goes, even squirting the various seasoning sauces right into the soup. But for the greatest enjoyment, with time to savor every drop and every morsel, McCarthy suggests the following
- Tear off the leaves from the herbs. Place the leaves and bean sprouts on the surface of the very hot soup, submerging them in the liquid with your chopsticks, squeeze some lime juice into the soup
- Squirt desired amounts of lime juice, fish sauce, chili pepper sauce, and hoisin sauce into little ramekins (most restaurants offer these on the tray that holds the chopsticks) or onto the vegetable plate. Mix together with the ends of the chopsticks. Replenish seasoning as needed.
- Hold the chopsticks in one hand and the soup spoon in the other. Lift a portion of meat, herbs, and/or noodles and place in the soup spoon. With the ends of the chopsticks, daub some seasoning mixture onto the spoon contents and eat. Alternately, pickup soup ingredients with chopsticks and dip into the seasoning mixture
- Pick up small portions of ingredients, including the noodles. Do not wrap up clumps of noodles for eating or scoop them up with the spoon. If you think you cannot handle long noodles, request the kitchen to cut up the noodles before adding to the bowl. Use the soup spoon for drinking the soup; never pick up the bowl to finish drinking the soup
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