Pho is Vietnam's national dish: one of the few noodle soup dishes among the national dishes of the world. In the U.S., Pho is fairly well known and heartily consumed, especially in areas with decent Vietnamese expat communities, like Southern California and Texas. Pho was certainly familiar to us, and therefore less of an exploratory experience than some other of our adventures. 

We thought it important to find some of the best Pho in New York City for this challenge, and so we read several articles listing excellent Vietnamese restaurants. Those lists and reviews can be tiresome and repetitive, and often the more one reads, the less one knows. However, Madame Vo in the East Village caught our eye for some of the descriptions of the broth, which for us is the key to a great Pho. 

Because there are so many options with Pho, it can be quite intimidating to American eaters. So here's an authoritative guide from an expert: the best way to eat Pho is to take a huge bite of the thai basil, stalks and all, and then drink the soup - keep it all in your mouth and then pour Sriracha directly into your mouth before swallowing it all while weeping profusely. Or you can just eat it whatever way you want, and refuse to be told how to do anything - the American way! 

Vietnamese cuisine is often said to bear the hallmarks of French influence. The Banh-mi, for instance, takes french bread and fills it with Vietnamese flavors. We don't know that we see this influence in Pho, and we think any reading of french influence would be doing more credit to the french than they are worth. For us, the flavor of Pho broth is a wholly distinct one. You could put it in front of us, anywhere in the world, and we would smell it and taste it and say it is Pho. That may seem an obvious thing to say, but it's actually not true of most world cuisine, especially from countries that have assembled their national cuisines based on various pilfered ideas from their former colonies. 

Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans

More American bombs have been deployed in Vietnam than any other country on earth and more Vietnamese people have been killed by American armed forces than any other nationality on earth. The USA created a puppet regime in South Vietnam during the war that, when it collapsed In 1975, created havoc for the Vietnamese people and led to a massive influx of Vietnamese-born people into the USA, mostly to California, over the following decades.

There are 2.3 million Vietnamese-Americans - an astounding figure when you consider that the number was in the low thousands prior to 1975. We wonder (but have no intention of finding out, because this is primarily a food-related blog), if there is any comparable influx of immigrants from a single country post-WW2.