Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Pho Thanh Thuy: This Noodle House ROCKS!

There's a little Vietnamese noodle house on Prince St. It's across the street from the Clipper Stadium, and if you blink, you'll miss it. It has a bit of a marketing problem in that I don't know how to pronounce the name, but it's worth the effort of my saying, "There's a great little Vietnamese Noodle House across the street from the Clipper Stadium."

It's Pho Thanh Thuy. This place has some GREAT Vietnamese food. I always start with the fresh spring rolls. These are not fried! Rice paper is filled with rice noodles, veggies, shrimp and pork slices, then dipped in a wonderful peanut sauce. Yum! Then it's on to the Pho--some of the best I've ever had. Pho is a noodle soup that's classically Vietnamese. It's street food. The working man's food. The key is the broth. It is a beef stock that's usually made with oxtail, beef brisket, and a whole lot of other spices. Made right, it has a rich and complex flavor that needs little doctoring up by the slurper. Rice noodles are placed in a bowl, topped with raw slices of beef - you can also get it with beef tripe and tendon, my favorites! Don't worry about the raw beef. The piping hot broth gets poured over everything and cooks it all. Another plate full of fresh vegetables comes with the meal. Put that into the entire mix, and you've got a meal in a bowl. Eric usually gets Bun. It's vermicelli noodles with vegetables, barbecued pork and an eggroll. The key ingredient here is the fish sauce that gets poured over all of it and mixed in. Delicious!

To top it all off, this place is extremely inexpensive. They raised their prices just slightly in the past few months, but a meal for two hardly ever breaks the $25 mark. And remember, we're big people and big eaters! The only negative we've been able to find is their hours. They close at 8PM most nights, and they're not open on Sundays or Mondays. So that means they're open most of the time. Maybe the problem is not theirs...

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

And yet again, when are we going?? ;)

Actually, I've been wanting to check that place out since it opened! But seeing as I've never actually eaten at a Vietnamese restaurant, I wanted to go with someone who knew what they were "doing" :)