Chef Duy showcases Vietnam’s popular dish Pho Ga

Parbina Rashid

It’s amazing how a bowl of hot Pho Ga can help two people bond. A Vietnamese chef and a North-East Indian foodie comparing notes while placed in the Punjabi heartland! Call it a kitchen date, if you may, where Chef Duy gets to cook his national dish at JW Marriott’s oriental restaurant kitchen and I get to be his first taster on Indian soil.

The anxiety of cooking in a foreign land is palpable. He is just one-day-old in the city, his experience with Indian food is limited to just aloo gobhi-naan and aloo parantha. Before boarding the flight, he had a menu for the food festival at Marriott, Chandigarh, in place, but his plan goes topsy-turvy as he is told — ‘beef is a complete no-no’. “We even beep that ‘B’ word,” I told him. He looks crestfallen, having to replace his star ingredient with chicken.

“This is my first visit to India. Hence the mistake,” he says. That, however, is not the only ‘mistake’ I spot as I watch him prepare his dish, Pho Ga, which is the chicken variety of the original Pho. He starts with the stock by boiling chicken and infusing flavours of coriander, onion, ginger, cabbage, radish and baby corn into it. Chef Duy had sipped all his ingredients in advance to retain the authentic taste.

Next, he boils the rice noodles and lets it sit for a couple of minutes in cold water. After what seems like an agonising wait, he finally prepares the bowl. Puts the noodles, adds some stock, some diced chicken, puts blanched bok choy, mushrooms, coriander and lemon leaves. He keeps it simple, a fuss-free comfort bowl. Too simple if compared to his Indian counterpart, Chef Tenzin’s version. The Indian chef uses star anise, cardamom, cinnamon stick and clove for the stock, adds Tibetan butter for richness and sprinkles dried red chillies for a bit of heat. He serves his bowl with bean sprouts, chilli slices, lime wedges and fried onion.

That’s the dish which is more likely to find favour with the city gentry. This bit of wisdom comes from personal experience. I have lost count how many times my bamboo shoot-fish-rice combo took the beatings from rajmah-chawal and my punch-phoran tempered daal bowed to its tadka-enriched Punjabi version! Here, simplicity is fine as long as it’s part of living room conversations, not on the dining table.

Chef Duy’s defence lies in celebrated poet Tu Mo’s poem, An Ode to Pho. Tu Mo captured the subtle flavour of the soup and its egalitarianism in his verses. To him, it is a dish loved by both the rich and the poor.

“I know Indian palate runs towards rich, spicy food, and, yes, I am willing to incorporate the Indian sensibilities in my cooking, but only to a certain extent. I can’t take the Vietnamese essence out of my dishes because I represent my country here,” he says. Despite his heavily accented English, there is no mistaking the resolute spirit.

I empathise. For, it’s not just another oriental dish. It’s Pho. Vietnam’s national dish. Pho was listed at number 28 on World’s 50 most delicious foods, compiled by CNN Go in 2011. Before that, the word Pho was added to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2007. There are many versions about the history regarding the origin of Pho and the most popular version says it began at the end of the 19th century, at the peak of French colonialism. In all likelihood, it evolved from a noodle soup called Xáo Trâu — a dish made with slices of water buffalo meat cooked in broth with rice vermicelli.

While Nam Dinh is believed to be the birthplace of Pho, its spiritual home is Hanoi. This is where Pho found its popularity. In sync with the turbulent history of Vietnam, Pho duly got divided in its form and flavour. It became Pho Bac in the North Vietnam, Pho Hue in the Central region, and Pho Sai Gon in South Vietnam.

While the history and geography around the dish do appeal to the foodie in me, all my senses, except for one, get relegated to the background the moment Chef Duy places the bowl in front of me. The bok choy, the snow-white eonki mushrooms, the velvety rice noodles and the delicate broth sing merrily inside my mouth, and it’s a happy tune!

(The food festival A Culinary Journey to Vietnam is on at JW Marriott till November 17)