Just ate 5 bowls of pho in Saigon in 48 hours, and I'm back. Here's my quick roundup.
Got in really late and ordered a bowl of pho tai from room service, 200,000 dong (like $10) - it was awful, like they dumped a whole side bowl of nuoc beo in there. It was like eating noodles in pure grease, this was a slap in the face after I'd just flown down here 6 hrs from Japan. Had a couple bites and couldn't do any more. This whole bowl was ridiculous for a number of reasons.
Woke up later that day, was finally time for the real deal - hit up Pho Hoa Pasteur for some more tai. Just like it looks in pics all over the internet, except I wasn't fully prepared to go straight from my hotel to a Vietnamese shop for the first time I guess - it was like 95 degrees in there, filthy, tables waited by young Vietnamese guys with sweat beads all over their faces, and the food wasn't good enough to make it charming, it's hard to tell what the restaurant was like from the pics of the food I'd seen before. I was honestly a little disappointed at first, then realized it was partly shock as well. Strong MSG flavor, meat was kinda crappy, the soup too subtle, and this was my first realization that the noodles in Vietnam are served softer than I'm used to and prefer:
Dinner we had back at the hotel after a day of running around, looking at stuff. It was a regular hotel restaurant, didn't plan to have pho; got thirsty and popped a bottle of Cristal but I got hungry later and I'd only had 2 bowls of pho on my trip by then so I figured I'd catch up and got a small mini bowl of pho tai; it was very different from the room service pho I got the night before, so I'm guessing they came from two different places. So Cristal and pho, drinks of a king, food of peasant.
Next day I started off with Pho 24, the fast food-ized pho place in Vietnam; people down this place but I thought it was alright, it was admittedly not as great at Pho Hoa but it was similarly bland and everything else was fairly in line with what I'd come to expect by the 4th bowl of pho in 36 hrs. Greasy head on the soup, but not excessively so like the joke bowl I got first from room service.
A few hours later, for the last bowl of pho, we were walking through the marketplace and had to wait 15 minutes on something and I spied Pho 2000 out on the street, so we went in for one last bowl of pho. Pho 2000 doesn't serve a choice of meats, they just serve Pho bo chin or pho ga. Really clean stock, but seasoned with nuoc mam more heavily than the others, less MSG sweetness/head feel though. I'm not really a fan of pho chin, prefer tai. Overall though, this was a decent bowl of pho. If it was tai, this would've been the best of the bunch, I think.
