Pho Ga - Chicken Noodle Soup

I eat pho - chicken or beef - almost every morning at the restaurant. It's also the first thing I eat when I go back to Vietnam. My family left Vietnam when I was twelve years old, and eighteen years passed before I returned. On my first trip back, I landed in Ho Chi Minh City in the morning from an overnight flight. It was disorienting to disembark from the plane into the humid day, stepping into a country that was both intensely familiar and also a distant memory. I went straight to a coffee shop, a noisy shoebox of a space where men were talking over coffee and the owner was dispensing bowl after bowl of pho. I was back in Vietnam.

Bowls of pho are the hamburgers of Vietnam: incredibly popular, eaten every day by a majority of the population, young and old. In the mornings in Ho Chi Minh City, you see commuters sitting astride their parked mopeds, slurping down a bowl before they continue on to work.

Every pho place serves the soup with a plate of garnishes: rau ram, mint, Thai basil, slices of jalapeno chile, mung bean sprouts, lime wedges, and sometimes fried shallots or Chinese doughnuts. The trick is to add a little bit of each item as you eat your way through the bowl, not to dump them in all at once. You want the herbs to maintain their fragrance, the bean sprouts to stay crunchy - it's all about aroma and texture, and if you add too much too soon, you'll end up with black herbs and soft sprouts, which defeats the whole purpose.