MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
JULIETTE WALL, 47, co-founded the Vietnamese restaurant chain Pho with her husband, Stephen, in 2005. They have a son, Thomas, 11. ONE of my earliest memories is of hours spent baking with my dad. I loved the creating and the tasting — the buzz you get from making food that brings people pleasure.
It became a massive hobby of mine. I studied food marketing and management at university, then worked in advertising for food brands. While I enjoyed it, I was frustrated by the industry’s instability. I was made redundant several times and didn’t feel I was the master of my own destiny.
When my husband lost his job in 2003, we decided it was time for a change. Yet we had no idea what it might be. So we decided to go travelling for seven months.
One of our first stops was Vietnam. It was here that we first tasted pho — a rich, aromatic noodle broth that you can adapt as you eat it, by adding herbs, spices and sauces.
It was different every time — the perfect dish you’d never get sick of. So simple, but not at all simple.
I thought: ‘I could eat this forever. Why aren’t we eating this at home? Everyone should be enjoying it.’ At the time, though, there were few Vietnamese restaurants.
This was my light bulb moment. It hit me on one of our last nights in Saigon, perched on stools on a crowded street corner, eating possibly the best pho of our trip.
It was a magical broth, thin and clear, with a deep beefiness and an explosion of textures and colours: hot chillies, crunchy vegetables, soft noodles.
I realised that, soon, I wouldn’t be able to eat this every day. And I didn’t want to stop!
After coming home, we scraped together seed funding by remortgaging the house and drew up a business plan. It was a huge risk. We had no idea if people would take to such an unknown dish.
The early days were tough: we lived off adrenaline, worked weekends and had no holidays. It was so stressful. In 2005, our head chef quit on the opening day of our first restaurant — I had to run down the road and beg him to come back!
In that first year, we served about 20 people a day. Now, 13 years on, it’s 31,000 — and 33,000 bowls of pho a week — in 27 outlets.
Yet we are, at our core, a family business. All of our ingredients are freshly prepared in store daily.
There’s nothing better than walking into a Pho and seeing people enjoying our food. It’s why I fell in love with cooking in the first place.
phocafe.co.uk