Pho is becoming so common that the noodle soup shops are popping up in even New York and Chicago, where few Vietnamese people actually live. Competition between restaurants has become so fierce that highly fetishized ingredients like bull penis are popping up (sorry) on menus as restaurants try to distinguish themselves. You won’t find bull penis in Houston, where food is less of a fashion statement, but with the third largest Vietnamese population in the country, you will find noodle shops so good they run out of pho before lunch.

That’s not to say Houston doesn’t have its share of disappointments. Too often, it tastes like seasoned Swanson’s original formula studded with overcooked noodles and tough meat; or, a restaurant might excel at one or two—but not all—elements of the pho. But more often than not, Pho Binh excels at every piece of the pho puzzle.

There are three locations including a trailer, which we’ll get to in a second. Typically, they’re situated in rather plain and beaten-down shopping centers with a non-descript mess of tables and chairs inside. Servers bob and weave silently through pho slurpers, refilling waters and taking orders.

The non-pho items here aren’t bad; rice plates come with heaps of fluffy crushed rice and aggressively grilled meat, though the aggression often comes at the cost of overcooked proteins, like dry, chewy short ribs. You can skip the starters such as fried Vietnamese egg rolls, which don’t have a superlative crunch nor exceptional porky-shrimpy flavor.

But none of this is the point—not for a place with “Pho” right in the name. This pho is a penetrating potion of profoundly developed flavors of beef bones and lean meat, intertwined with twists of sweet onion flavor, ratcheted up with slips of hard spices like star anise and clove. We like to order ours with sliced rare steak to cook slowly in the broth, fatty brisket, and crunchy tripe for extra texture. The noodles are usually perfectly toothsome—a refreshing change from the overcooked ones found elsewhere in town.

About that converted trailer on Beamer—the air conditioning is not so much and it’s in a ditch, but somehow the pho here is even better than what’s coming out of the more traditional locations. Come after 10am on Sunday and you may go home empty-handed—pho is the only thing on the menu, so when it’s gone, it’s gone. And there won’t even be any bull penis to comfort you.

The Vietnamese I know stay away from the place due to its mediocrity. I've been 2 or 3 times and the last time the Pho was too salty. That was enough.

matthou - 2009-11-03 11:05

Post your comment

Name: or Login
Comment:

Type the letters you see in the image below. Letters are not case-sensitive.