At Pho Ga Dong Nai, soup is personal
Fresh, tailored ingredients and great service in play
My glasses were all steamed up because I had leaned forward over my bowl of pho to catch the scent of star anise and cinnamon drifting up from the hot beef broth. It was midmorning at Pho Ga Dong Nai on Bellaire Boulevard, and it was the happiest I had felt in weeks.
Such is the life-affirming effect this Vietnamese noodle soup has always had on me, from the very first time, many decades back, that I learned to customize it using the plateful of fresh herbs and bean sprouts served alongside. Sweet, pebbly mint leaves; the darker twinge of pointy Thai basil; maybe the volatile clangor of cilantro frills or the slightly more decorous aroma of culantro, the long, serrated leaf that Christine Dang, the effervescent host at Pho Ga Dong Nai, calls “Vietnamese coriander.” Those are the smells and shapes I look forward to.
Then there’s the sheer fun of eating pho. It’s a process that demands attention, dexterity, full participation: figuring out which of a galaxy of beef cuts you want as add-ins; tearing herbs and stirring sprouts; squeezing in some lime or plopping in a jalapeño wheel or two; chasing the long rice noodles around the bowl with chopsticks; slurping up errant strands and sipping long drafts of fragrant
broth.
Pho Ga Dong Nai is my current favorite spot to indulge in such pleasures. The young Asiatown shop actually specializes, as the word “Ga” in its name indicates, in chicken pho — and that soup is glorious stuff, indeed. But I was cheered to find that its beef noodle soup is worthy, too, with a pure, long-simmered beef-bone broth that has just enough salt underlying that important trace of warm-toned sweet spices.
I like all the options on this short and sweet soup menu as well, including the chance to order extra rosyrare, sliced marinated steak (them tái uóp, which rhymes with “oop”) on the side, to swish just briefly through the broth. Or a plateful of very lightly pickled onions, with a fine, crisp snap to them. Or a side of egg, or extra soft, gelatinous tendon, my favorite furbelow for a bowl of beef pho. This is the first place where I’ve ever been given a choice of bean sprouts steamed or raw when ordering, too.
When I asked Christine about the perceived merits of steaming the sprouts, she told me that some customers — many of them the older ones — prefer the harmony of the softer texture and warmer temperature of the steamed sprouts in hot broth. She, like me, likes the brisk, cool contrast of the raw ones. But that’s the beauty of this versatile soup, especially here: you build to suit. It’s personal.
Which is how I ended up tasting Christine’s personal favorite, miên gà, a simple chicken soup with clear noodles. I was already smitten with the restaurant’s specialty, pho gà khô, a dry chicken pho with broth on the side, the praises of which I shall sing further down the page. But chicken soup with cellophane noodles? Sounds a bit boring.
Now I can’t stop thinking about it: the clear, golden chicken broth, made from regionally sourced, free-range organic chickens (yes, the difference sings); the expressive soft chicken slices; the savory-sweet twist of shallots frizzled in garlic oil, afloat on the surface, a tiny touch that has big impact. I shook in some white pepper from a tabletop shaker because Christine said that was all she adds to this particular soup.
At first, when I tackled the bowl, its tight central knot of clear bean-thread noodles resisted me. But I herded them with my chopsticks the way my Australian cattle dog tries to shepherd my cats, nudging and corralling and nudging again, until the knot unwound into slippery and thrillingly slurpable strands. The white pepper at first had a slight rough spicy grip on the tongue, which then developed into a delightful little burn. As I ate — finishing the broth to the last drop — I found myself thinking that I could eat this soup every day.
The same expressive chicken is a big part of what makes the dry chicken pho so special here. The slices of both dark and white meat sit, crowned with ribbons of gold skin, on top of a bowl of rice noodles tossed with a sweet-and-salty brown sauce, so that the final effect, once all the herb and sprouts and pickled onion slices and whatnot have been mixed in, is kind of like a frisky noodle salad. There’s cilantro and onion in the mix, and those flavor-packed frizzled shallots for crunch, and the slip-slide and soft snap of the chicken skin for a final textural thrill.
You mix it all together, chopstick up the noodles and sip the broth at intervals. Or at least that’s the way I like to handle things. At intervals, I fished out the chicken slices and dunked them in a side dish of sprightly, fish-saucy ginger dip, a potion so captivating I wish the place sold it by the jar.
I admit to picking up the bowl at the end to drain the last dregs of the broth, right down to the last specks of white pepper. So good was this broth (and the beef broth for the pho, for that matter) that I never felt moved to add lime or jalapeño.
I did squeeze some lime juice on the noodle heap, however, which gave the dry chicken pho dish some of the contrapuntal flavor bounce of a good pad Thai.
Pho Ga Dong Nai distinguishes itself by going the extra mile on ingredient quality, from the pristine herbs and sprouts to that superior chicken. Christine credits her aunt, Kim Nguyen, for being a fanatic about ingredients. Nguyen owns the soup restaurant with her sister, Judy Dang — Christine’s mother, and one or more of this formidable trio is usually in the house.
Kim Nguyen’s daughter is married to John Nguyen, the talented crawfish maestro of Cajun Kitchen (like Pho Ga Dong Nai, an honoree on this year’s Chronicle Top 100 Restaurants list); and there are a couple of other crawfish and soup shops in the family’s stable as well. Pay your very reasonable bill at the cheerful counter, and you can see business cards for the family restaurants in their own little card rack.
They’re very good at what they do. And the hospitality at Pho Ga Dong Nai zips along with good cheer — plus, for English speakers or pho newbies — the sparkling ministrations of Christine, who is one of the best restaurant hosts I’ve come across in Houston.
How good? She persuaded me to imbibe a kelly-green pandan drink swimming with fruit jellies, yogurty boba balls and those creepy-looking teensy eyeball spheroids otherwise known as basil seeds. Now I’m hooked.
There’s a useful all-day aspect to this spare, bright room. The doors open at 8 a.m. for the Vietnamese breakfast crowd, and there’s usually a knot of customers waiting to get in for their ritual soup bowls.
A brisk to-go business depends on clever packaging of the various soup elements. And the appeal to Houstonians is broad: while I peppered Christine with questions, three older guys at a table behind me joked together in Vietnamese. Catty corner to my left, two fellows in work clothes plied their chopsticks while conversing in Spanish.
All of us left well fed, even buoyed, and not much the poorer.