PHO GA IS HAVING ITS NYC MOMENT

Pho Ga Vang opened in Chinatown a few weeks ago, at 30 Market Street between Madison and Henry streets, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. The restaurant sits atop a flight of stairs on the parlor floor of a townhouse. Inside, two neat rows of tables run the length of the restaurant, and the walls are festooned with pictures featuring chicken puns and jokes.

The place comes from a chicken pho restaurant in the famous Vietnamese enclave of Eden Center of Falls Church, Virginia, and the owner is Tony Le. He told Northern Virginia Magazine — which celebrates the location for its excellent broth — that his mother is Northern Vietnamese, and his cooking style has been influenced by Orange County, California’s Little Saigon, which offered dishes from the north and south. It was where he first grew up and his mother first cooked; the family later opened a restaurant in Philadelphia that has developed quite a following.

I was especially excited about the opening because it reminded me of pho ga cafes in Houston, where I had been sent for a Lucky Peach assignment to write on the city’s Vietnamese food scene several years ago. At Pho Ga Dakao in Houston, I set about eating pho ga for breakfast. It was delicious, made with a pale but tasty chicken stock. The flavor and textures blew me away with the addition of chicken giblets, including gizzards, liver, and heart. I’d been looking for a similar bowl outside of Houston ever since.

Perhaps it had arrived, I thought on my first visit to Pho Ga Vang. There were no organ meats available, but I tried the chicken pho ($15) anyway. The menu lists a handful of versions, including traditional chopped chicken, white meat, half or whole chicken. I went with traditional, with raw onions, cilantro, chopped scallions, and pale pieces of sliced, bone-in chicken, which demanded to be picked up and gnawed. The broth was fragrant and rich, a beautiful yellowish color. It came with a small dish of tart sauce laced with vinegar and black pepper for dipping meats or adding to the soup.

On another visit, offal was available, including a primarily organ meat option. Another dish, an appetizer ($15) displayed gizzards and trứng gà non, young eggs that hadn’t been fully formed (or for that matter, laid). They’re a yellowish white, rubbery, and mild.

On this visit, I resolved to get the appetizer and sweep the gizzards (with liver and heart too) into my chicken soup in order to recreate the version I’d eaten in Houston. The result was an impressive bowl of pho ga.

Pho Ga Vang has beef pho, too, with the usual assortment of beef cuts, which are not necessarily as good as can be found elsewhere in Chinatown. Other things on the menu are really worth ordering, though, including extra-long cha gio ($10), crisp and bulging with pork. I didn’t try include shrimp pho, beef stew with egg noodles, grilled pork and vermicelli, or a lemongrass-chicken rice platter.

Perhaps more interesting to the pho lover is that these excellent rice noodles — here more delicate and fragrant than most in town — are available in broth ($10) good enough to slurp on its own.

2024-09-04T19:17:02Z dg43tfdfdgfd