These Sour Noodles Will Have Their Day

After a three-hour drive, we pull up to our usual lunch spot in Lạng Sơn City. It advertises as a morning, noon, and night eatery, but it is prone to closing down an hour here, a couple hours there, throughout the day. One such closure was imminent before my girlfriend jumped from my car and did the Vietnamese woman Jedi mind trick of informing a proprietress on her way elsewhere that, in fact, her business is not closed and that she is eager to serve a pair of late arrivals.

Of course everything reopens immediately.

The place offers a variety of dishes through the day and full group dinners at night, but we’re here for a specific local specialty tucked down at the bottom of the menu: Phở chua. Sour phở

We sit at a table in the empty restaurant. An elderly man brings us a pot of strong green tea, glasses with ice, and bottled water for us to mix ourselves. Ten minutes after disappearing into her reopened kitchen, the proprietress brings out two dishes. They are exactly what we were after, and gorgeous to boot.

“I’m surprised this isn’t more popular elsewhere around Vietnam. It’s really great,” I say to my girlfriend, instantly remembering that this is what I always say when we eat here.

She smirks in that way that is absolutely intended for me to see but also ostensibly masked enough not to be impolite.

“And furthermore,” I quickly add, hoping to neutralize my redundancy (I’m neither old enough to be compulsively repeating my talking points nor young enough to rule out age as a cause for doing so), “I don’t see why this isn’t a huge hit outside of Vietnam.”

“It is sour. Not everybody loves sour things like you do,” she reminds me.

“I don’t think Westerners would consider it sour, exactly. We’d probably call it tangy.”

“Tangy?”, she asks, suspicious of my sudden assertion that a dish literally called sour phở in Vietnamese would not be considered sour in another language.

“It’s similar to sour, but something more. It’s a good thing. A good flavor.”

“Because you like sour. Not everybody likes sour.”

“No, we use tangy to mean something different. Something more than sour.”

A raised eyebrow.

“Tangy is like when you have a sour part of a dish, but there are a bunch of other things there too. It’s not just sour, but that sour part can kind of peek through and you clearly taste it with all the other things mixed in. It’s not too big or overwhelming.”

She makes that expression that says she hasn’t conceded the point but sees little value in pursuing it.

She eats, but I rotate mine slowly in front of me. I can’t help going on. It’s such a simple dish loaded with confusion waiting to happen, and we love to tease each other about ways our respective societies misunderstand one another.

“Even the look of it,” I say, “the way it is served here ticks all the boxes for being a trendy hit abroad. The way the sausage is sliced and arranged on top of the noodles with julienned carrots, herbs, and peanuts. They’d call it a bánh mì noodle salad bowl in America and charge $12 for it.”

Across the table her eyes narrow in stages as she considers whether she misunderstood me, if I might be foolish enough to think what I just said made sense, or if any of it is worth asking for clarification over.

“Bánh mì?” is all she can muster.

“I know. I KNOW. But most people eating Vietnamese food abroad get a “Bánh Mì Sandwich” and assume that the word bánh mì refers to what it is inside — like it’s a style of dressing a sandwich or flavoring it. Now they just add bánh mì to anything they want to put some herbs or sliced carrots on.”

“ But Bánh mì…” she says drifting off.

“Yeah, but only a few styles of them caught on overseas. They have no idea. “

“Why not just call it Phở chua, or,” derisively, “Tangy phở?”

“Ah, yes, because that would confuse them to no end. You see, they don’t know that Phở gets its name from the Bánh phở. They assume that “phở” refers to the broth and is always a soup. If you served them Phở chua under its actual name, they’d tell you it was all wrong. They’d be more likely pour some bone broth loaded with cinnamon over a pile of beans and call it phở.”

“Ôi giời ơi.”

“And then some years back, everyone suddenly decided that if you sliced up a bunch of stuff neatly on rice or noodles, you could call it bowl food and that somehow made it special.”

“Bowl food.” She says it without a hint of curiosity.

“It all looks so much like the way Japanese ramen or Korean bibimbap is presented that it wouldn’t surprise if it started by mimicking those. Now you just take something not usually in a bowl, slice up its components, and let people mix it with some rice or noodles and ta-da: bowl food.”

“Can you just eat?”

“I’m telling you. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Be quiet.”

“It’s going to be huge, this right here. Au-then-tic Vietnamese tangy bánh mì noodle salad bowl.”

“I should have let them close.”