Ten things not to miss in Vietnam:

#4 – Ph? – Beef noodle soup. The breakfast that built a nation.

Lonely Planet: Vietnam

Ph? is a simple dish, for a simple time of day. In Vietnam, it’s easy: you need beef broth, thin slices of beef (bó), and rice noodles, preferably eight inches long or more. Throw that together and serve with a plate full of bean sprouts, jalapeños, stalks of some kind of leaf that looks like mint but doesn’t taste like it, and some limes. With few exceptions, to eat Ph? is to start things, to go out in the world with all your best intentions and all the vitamins and proteins and carbs you need to meet it half way.

When you eat it, you eat the history of the world. You eat the dish Ho Chi Minh ate before he took his morning voyage to Paris for the first time. You ate what the VC did before they started the Tet Offensive. You eat what all the parents of all your Vietnamese friends ate before they got on that flight or that container ship to L.A., thinking what all the others who ate the dish were thinking before them: “my stomach is full now, my soul is satisfied. Let’s go learn about socialism now; let’s go fight America. Let’s go immigrate; let’s go start the day.”

In Oakland, Vietnamese food usually implies Ph?, and any place that serves it usually has a page to two pages of different options on its menu for ways to customize and rearrange your beef broth and noodles. If you want, you can get it with four varieties of cow parts floating in there, from tripe to tendon to little hemisphered meat balls featuring an only-they-know category of pureed and reprocessed beef. In Vietnam, that level of assortment is considered extravagant. Along with backrests on chairs and menus, it’s reserved for only the upscale places on the main drags in District 1. Most places are cheap: 40,000 dong (about two dollars), but you can get it for much less if you must.

How many conversations have I started over a bowl of piping hot rice noodles and beef broth? I can’t even begin to count. Back home, some days, that bowl and these chopsticks were all you had in common with the guy in front of you, and sometimes it was enough.

“So where you want to eat,” they’d ask. There’s never a question of ‘what’ only ‘where.’

At home, there’s so many places, it’s often hard to decide where to go. There’s Ph? Saigon on Fruitvale and Macarthur, Ph? Hoa Binh on 8th, Ph? Anh Dao on 18th, Ph? 84 on 17th. Ph? Hoa Lao, Ph? Hoa Hiep, Ph? Ao Sen. Ph? Saigon, Ph? Little Saigon, Ph? Saigon II. For no reason at all except the name, we sometimes went to a little one on East 14th called “Ph? King.” Can you use chopsticks? Let’s hope so. Six bucks and you’re in the club.

One time I was in Nha Trang, this beach town on the north central coast, about six hours north of Saigon by train. I was sick of Saigon. I was sick of being ripped off and shouted at for no reason, so I found a cheap hotel to throw my bags down and a little bar up the street and around the corner to go pass the time. After three or four nights I got close to the owners and their relatives who tended to carouse the place. One of them dealt pot to passing tourists; the others played pool. There was this Irish guy there who handed out fliers on the street in exchange for boarding rights in the backroom of the place, and together we’d hustle tourists who came in trying to show off their skills at the pool table.

I swear, this one time, four hours after closing the whole place got on a fleet of motos and we started driving to god knows where.

“Where we going?” I asked someone.

“For food,” for Ph?. And we ended up at the base of a socialist billboard promoting literacy looming over a pile of rubble. And underneath there was a little Ph? stand, with plastic chairs and little plastic tables. We sat down and they served us all. 20,000 Dong and you were in the club. The breakfast that built a nation! And this was Vietnam. Take that, Dad.

Home again. “Do you like Rooster sauce? Cuz I hate it, makes it unnatural,” I’d say. “You see people who eat that shit and it taints the broth, makes it all reddish brown like something that came out of a sewer system instead of the translucent haze it’s suppose to look like. So after they’ve eaten everything else they don’t want to have the best part. But to eat Ph?, you gotta have it all, all together, with two chopsticks in one hand and a spoon in the other, consuming it all, inhaling it, sucking up the steam with noodles with the broth with every cow part floating around with it, all in the same breath, with every breath.”

In Nha Trang I was hungry, and it was late, so I went to the only place that was open in the area. I sat down and at the table next to mine there were some soldiers, sitting there, eating like they owned the place, as they often did in this quasi-socialist police state.

One reached for a napkin, but the guys were fresh out, so he came to my table and took the whole rack. Two nods and we understood each other, like

“You’re a jerk,” and

“That’s nice. Now shut up and eat your noodles.”

My friends and I were in Times Square this one time, wearing suits. It was my last night so we thought we’d dress for the occasion, and rehash old memories. One of my friends ssaid there was Ph? there. Somehow we’d gotten lucky enough not to get caught smoking a blunt two blocks off of Times Square, so needless to say we were hungry. I had to throw my tie back as I slurped up the noodles.

“Look at this,” I said. “They’ve got Ph? in Times Square now, the epicenter of popular culture and comodification worldwide. It’s gonna be like what sushi was ten years ago. Before you know it they’ll be serving it in our college cafeterias.” The “breakfast that built a nation,” as they say.