I like mine with a dollop of whatever they’ve got: sticky black bean sauce and a little red chili, the oily hot sauce with red pepper flakes at the bottom that needs no name other than the hot one, which you never forget because it burns your lips each time. And the platter of fresh, earthy bean sprouts, smooth and crisp, that give a little mist of water when you take a bite. I prefer the lime wedges, but I’ll still squeeze the lemon. I pluck the Thai basil leaves right off the stem and drop them in with a few green chiles.
Everyone has their own way of eating it. Some go au naturel, leaving the broth in its original form. These purists would say to tamper with the broth is a kind of sacrilege. But I like to see the color change from a golden brown to a dark cloudy storm with crimson oil bubbles on top. I like how the Thai basil leaves add to the aroma, balancing out the cinnamon and cardamom. I like the ceremony of dropping the ingredients inside the bowl and mixing them around, the flavors mingling, the steam wafting up. And the noodles: the soft white rice noodles with their heaviness, and their stickiness too, made to wrap around the chopsticks, to lift and stretch and bounce above the bowl without breaking, to hold the broth’s flavor for that exquisite first bite. Sometimes the tender flank steak rolls up inside the noodles with the bean sprouts, or one last beef meatball hides under a mountain of noodles with a rogue green chili. Whatever the combination, each one tastes right.
I love the comradery at the pho shop—the middle-aged man at the table who serves his friends jasmine tea from the tiny teapot first, paying careful attention to their miniature cups so he can refill them. This is the way with my friends too. We fight at the cash register to pay for the group, bumping each other in front of the ATM machine, and racing the person who claims to be headed to the washroom. More often than not, someone has stealthy snuck out from the table to pay, and we leave shaking our heads. Inevitably, another friend says they are treating all of us to ice cream.
We have been coming to this pho shop together for years. In pairs and threes, with New Year’s Day hangovers, and for birthdays when we have to borrow chairs from the back to cram everyone in. We get the same extras to share: salad rolls with tangy peanut sauce, spring rolls we drop into tiny bowls of sweet and vinegary fish sauce, and shredded carrots. The usual suspects order mango bubble tea. When it comes to the main course, we stare down politely at the menus, rubbing wooden chopsticks together, pretending to consider another dish. Faithfully, we all end up ordering number 37. It’s different every time, and it always tastes the same.
Natasha Zarin‘s work has appeared in Event, The Maynard, Grand Dame Literary, Press Pause Press. In 2021, she read at the Emerging Writers and Readers Series in Toronto (virtually). Natasha lives in Surrey, BC with her partner and two children. She is currently writing about tentacles and tripe in a memoir about food and family.
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