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I routed through Ho Chi Minh City on my way to London to save money, and unexpectedly ended up with an extra 24 hours.

The last time I was in Ho Chi Minh City was five years ago, when Vietnam’s stock market was buzzing and looked like a model emerging market. Out of curiosity, I opened an account and bought Vinamilk, the so-called “Kweichow Moutai of Vietnam,” as a value investment. Five years later, the stock price hasn’t budged.

Thankfully, the delicious taste of Pho hasn’t changed either.

As a semi-amateur Pho fanatic, I’ve found that chasing this flavor back home comes at a high cost. A humble Vietnamese street-food staple like Pho somehow ends up costing 60 or 70 RMB a bowl in Shanghai, to the point that flying to Saigon just to eat Pho can feel like the better deal.

By the time I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, it was already past midnight. Riding on the back of a Grab driver’s speeding motorbike, I didn’t even bother going to the hotel first—I asked him to take me straight to a Pho place he often eats at.

Bui Vien Street glows with a surreal kind of nightlife, and this 24-hour spot, Pho Quynh, is just about the best comfort food for a late-night stomach. All kinds of diners sat along the noisy street, while a few children selling odds and ends weaved through the crowd.

A bowl of rare beef pho arrived, and I hurriedly took a sip of the broth first. It was hot enough to make me wince, but the sweet, savory depth lingering on my tongue felt like reuniting with an old friend. Only then did I slowly add in the garnishes and take another sip—this time, it seemed layered with even more flavor.

The beef here was a bit tough and the noodles a little rough around the edges, but what I was really eating was the joy of reunion after a long absence.

The guy told me there was a great banh mi spot nearby—Vietnamese baguette, another national favorite—and suggested I give it a try. I told him sorry, but this trip was for Pho and Pho alone.

Pho can be a late-night meal, breakfast, or something you eat at pretty much any hour of the day. Vietnamese people also love starting early with a bowl, and by morning the nearby Pho Phu Vuong was already packed with office workers.

This place takes things seriously, offering different cuts of beef. The menu is complex, almost like a Chaoshan beef hot pot restaurant, where ordering becomes a craft in itself. I ordered a Pho Ve, apparently a cut from the flank area, with just the right balance of fat and lean.

Beef may be the star, but the broth is still the soul. Every shop has its own secret recipe: beef bones simmered for hours, seasoned with fish sauce, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, cardamom, and more. A good broth should be clear, sweet, and deeply flavorful.

The broth has to be clear and sweet, the noodles smooth and springy without turning mushy, and the beef tender. For such a simple bowl, making Pho truly delicious is no easy task.

Pho noodles are somewhat similar to Chaoshan kway teow or Hunan rice noodles; even the rice noodles from my hometown have something in common with them. The exact origins are debated, but there’s little doubt that the noodle itself came from China.

China and Vietnam have had a love-hate relationship for two thousand years, and food is hardly the only thing they share. Place names like “district” and “ward,” which sound almost archaic in Chinese today, are still official administrative divisions in Vietnam.

Most of Ho Chi Minh City’s main sights are concentrated in District 1 and easy to cover on foot.

The Fine Arts Museum was just a few minutes’ walk from the Pho shop, housed in a pale yellow French colonial building. The architecture is gorgeous: arches of all sizes give the whole structure a light, lively feel, and the glass and railings are full of thoughtful design touches. Tickets are cheap, too. The biggest problem, however, is this: no! air! conditioning!

After a few laps inside, I was already drenched in sweat.

The exhibits are refined. The museum may not be world-famous, but it brings together top Vietnamese artists, and its calm, gentle works reveal plenty of local life and customs. In this painting, for example, a mother is teaching her child to write—and if you look closely, they’re writing Chinese characters.

The museum wasn’t crowded and felt wonderfully quiet. Wandering through it slowly was a good way to digest both Pho and Vietnam itself.

Inspired by being surrounded by art, I created a piece of my own called Window.

Then the Pho hunt continued. Caught in a sudden downpour, I ducked into Pho Hoa Pasteur, another famous local noodle shop that opened in 1968—back when the Vietnam War still hadn’t ended.

Like the endless north-vs.-south debates over zongzi or savory vs. sweet tofu pudding, every great food culture seems to have its own long-running authenticity wars, and Pho is no exception. Whether it’s the sweetness of the broth or the width of the noodles, the most obvious difference is still this big plate of “mysterious Oriental leaves” you see on the tables at Pho shops in Ho Chi Minh City.

Thai basil and culantro—don’t worry if you don’t know them by name. A large plate is shared with the next table over; you take a little, tear it up, toss it into the soup with raw bean sprouts, and squeeze in some lime juice. The herbal chemistry instantly makes the flavor bloom.

Using a Suzhou expression, Pho Hoa’s bowl would count as a standard “broad soup”—the kind you can gulp down until you’re half full on broth alone. The rare beef arrives still pink and slowly cooks in the boiling soup. My only regret was that the beef was cut too finely and still a bit tough.

This place even had youtiao and zongzi on the table for diners to help themselves to. The breadth of the product line was honestly astonishing.

If you like heat, you can also add a few rings of chili—green tinged with yellow, yellow tinged with red. I’d heard about this kind of pepper long ago in old food writing.

I still haven’t been to Hai Phong, but I’d like to someday.

Back when Mr. Wang was writing about eating pho, Pho was still only a street food from northern Vietnam. The wars that followed sent Pho traveling far beyond its origins. I often think that if someone drew a map of Pho’s evolution, it would trace, with remarkable precision, more than half a century of Vietnamese migration—from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, and then from South Vietnam out to the rest of the world.

In those turbulent years, Pho was not only a way for Vietnamese refugees to make a living, but also a source of comfort. In one small bowl of Pho, there can be an immense amount of homesickness.

When I was working in Melbourne, Vietnamese colleagues took us to a great Pho shop. As a second-generation Vietnamese Australian born in Australia, one of them rarely returned to his parents’ homeland. That bowl of rice noodles may well have been his strongest link to his roots.

Food in evolution is always one of humanity’s most faithful record-keepers.

Just around the corner from Pho Hoa is another must-see in Ho Chi Minh City: the Pink Church.

Vietnam is one of Southeast Asia’s major Catholic countries, and Catholicism arrived there even earlier than it did in China. The number of Catholics remains large today, as does their influence in society. Considering that Vietnam was colonized by France for nearly a century, this is hardly surprising.

The Pink Church’s Gothic architecture is similar to that of another cathedral not far away. The color scheme, though, is anything but typical: one feels like an elegant elder in the family, while this one is more like a playful young girl.

A newly opened café across the street has a great view and is a nice place to admire the church.

As the former capital of South Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City was also a Catholic stronghold. The Ngo family, who held the South Vietnamese presidency, were devout Catholics. What’s perplexing is how, once a religion becomes powerful, it often tries to suppress others. President Ngo’s crackdown on Buddhists led to a world-shocking event at an intersection fewer than ten blocks from here.

Tolerance and understanding are always the hardest things.

Walking back from the Pink Church to the city center, the sights keep coming: the Saigon Central Post Office, the cathedral, the People’s Committee building, and the Opera House—an uninterrupted stretch of French-style architecture. I’ve heard the AO show at the Opera House is quite good, combining Vietnamese acrobatics with local storytelling.

I’m honestly surprised nobody back home has turned something like this café apartment concept into a viral attraction—it would have been an old-school internet hit for sure.

Seeing this man outside a roadside shop, legs crossed and looking completely at ease, I could almost believe I’d been transported back to some small town in Guangdong.

Some Pho shops offer all kinds of beef cuts, while others focus on just one thing. Pho Bo Vien has no menu at all—it sells only one bowl: beef meatball pho. The meatballs reminded me of hand-pounded Chaoshan beef balls, and the noodles were strikingly similar to Wenzhou rice noodles. Somehow, one bowl of Pho tasted like home.

Before I really got to know Pho, I used to eat lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant downstairs from my office and order a bowl of “locomotive pho.” But when I came to Ho Chi Minh City and asked Vietnamese people what “locomotive pho” was, they looked at me blankly. I honestly have no idea where that name came from.

In the nearby residential quarter, hidden up a flight of worn-down stairs, is one of Asia’s 50 Best bars. Order a Saigon, and call the city by its old name.

Twenty-four hours later, I was once again on the back of that guy’s speeding motorbike, racing toward the airport. But before leaving Ho Chi Minh City, the one thing I still couldn’t let go of was that bowl of Pho. I tapped him on the back and asked him to pull over at one more noodle shop.

Pho Hung had the richest broth of them all, and its deluxe toppings left this Pho-hunting trip with absolutely no regrets.

At Saigon’s most enchanting, this is the thing I long for most. The only question is: when will I be back?

And one final question: with such an astonishing variety of noodles across China from north to south, why is it that none of them has gone truly global in the way Pho or Japanese ramen has? What do you think the reason is?

About the Author

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