You’re reading part 3 of a 3 part series of posts.  Here’s 1 and 2.

The treasures inside A Dong Grocery anchor a shopping center with many businesses which serve the Asian-American community.  Pho Boston (weirdly, not in Boston, still in West Hartford here) is an eatery dedicated to, among other things, Pho, the traditional Vietnamese soup of beef broth and noodles.

There’s also a video store, with signs and posters in the front window advertising the media of different Asian cultures inside.  This is next to Super Laundromat, advertised as the “Largest Coin-operated Laundry in CT!”

Next A Dong in the corner is wireless store and Thai Room.  The day I visited for these pictures I was looking for lunch, and deciding between Thai Room and Pho Boston was not too hard.  While some Thai noodles or curry sounded good, Thai Room was empty and Pho Boston had 5 or 6 tables full on a Thursday at 11:30.  I picked Pho Boston.

I sit down knowing two things.  One, I will order Pho, despite the pretty large menu full of other stuff.  Two, I don’t know anything about Pho.  Don’t get me wrong, I know the basics - it’s beef soup, it has noodles and meat and other stuff, but as far as procedure and custom and know-how goes, I am a novice.

On the table is a Lazy Susan-type rotating platform with several bottles and utensils.  I am presented with something I recognize, a glass of ice water, and something I don’t, but it’s in a glass, it’s steaming, and it’s yellow.  I sniff.  It’s tea, very floral, Jasmine or some other tea which smells very Jasmine-y to me.  My waiter appears and I order the Pho at the top of the Pho selections.  It’s at the top of the page and in big red letters, so it’s either really hot or really good or both, any of which are fine by me.  The description also includes ground peanuts (I think all food should have the option of coming with ground peanuts on top) and cucumber and tomato, which don’t sound traditional, but like I said, big red letters compel me.

Next comes a plate, mounded high with sprouts, fresh basil, some lime wedges, and a chili.  The sprouts are crisp and plump at the same time, just as they should be.  The chili pepper is small and green, probably very hot.  I’m suspecting this should go into my soup, but I nosh and nibble a little bit while I wait, and try to look around at what other people are doing with their plate of sprouts without looking like the Pho neophyte I am.

My bowl of steaming broth and beef and mystery arrives.

I take a taste and it’s really steaming hot.  I give my bowl a moment to rest while I remove a few small saucers from my Lazy Susan and I investigate my condiments.  The biggest bottle is also the most familiar, Sriracha, something that seems to have spread across the globe and has become ubiquitous across cultures when it comes to eating food that should have a hot, garlicky kick.  The next bottle is a chunkier version of the same idea, like Huy Fong Foods’s Chili Garlic Sauce in a squirt bottle.  Another squirt bottle holds a dark, thick, gooey substance.  I dip my thumb in and it tastes like hoisin.  Two more bottles, glass, with little metal lids like oil and vinegar shakers.  One is full of an intensely dark, rich, salty soy sauce.  The other is fish sauce, a bit salty like soy but also with that semi-fermented, semi-fishy funkiness of the sea.

Through some sort of cultural/food relativism, I come to understand what I’m looking at here with the bowl of steaming beef juice and plate of sprouts and collection of squirt bottles.  These are not exactly sides, or condiments.  Coming from the South, I know these are fixin’s.  Vietnamese fixin’s.

The soup is good.  The beef flavor is strong but not at all overpowering or artificial in flavor, and there are hints here and there of the warming spices typical in Pho, like star anise.  The meat is sliced very thin and cooked through.  It resembles gray shoe leather but it is sliced so thin it is still very tender.  The cucumber and tomato seem like weird additions to me but the ground peanuts are great, and add a lot in terms of flavor and texture.  The noodles hiding at the bottom of the huge bowl are plentiful but I do wish they were a bit more chewy.  By the end of the bowl I got a bit more brave, adding in fish sauce and the chili condiments to amp up the heat and salt levels to something a bit more intense.

By noon the room was half full.  A handful of tables looked like business people or workers meeting on lunch breaks.  There was also a steady stream of people who looked Asian, and sounded Asian when they spoke to their waiters.  It was clear many different kinds of people were at Pho Boston, and maybe for different reasons.  As an Urban Studies major at UConn, one of my main interests is “place,” not just in a semantic or common sense way, but as a concept and theory.  The idea seems deceptively simple but as I slurped on my Pho I was very mindful of the different ways a place as seemingly simple as Pho Boston could be percieved.

One way we could look at the “place” of Pho Boston is as a descriptivist.  Pho Boston is a restaurant, named for a large city in Massachusetts, in West Hartford, Connecticut.  It has certain dimensions and physical features along within its physical boundaries.  Inside people eat food with origins in Vietnam, a physical place, a politically formed nation-state, and a culture in and of itself.  A descriptive approach to Pho Boston might also include was is particular about it - what makes it unique, and distinct from other comparable places.

A social constructionist might look at Pho Boston within greater schemes of social process.  Is Pho Boston shaped by the capitalist economy in which it exists?  Are there social norms within typical Pho eateries which have been “Westernized” to appeal to more people in the surrounding market?  It may seem like a stretch to apply such highfalutin ideas to something as benign as a place which sells beef-noodle soup, but a look at the “place” of Pho Boston through the lens of social construction may reveal there are many things we assume about a place which we take for granted.  The assumptions or “rules” we have about place may really not be all that common sense, and they may actually be quite arbitrary.  Discovering the sources of these social norms may be quite enlightening and illustrative when it comes to understanding place.

Finally, a phenomenological approach will look at human experience in an effort to explain concepts of place and even being “in-place.”  Phenomenologists argue that knowledge of place is pre-scientific, and is really more just about the state of existing in a place than any complicated thesis about “place.”  So, with that metaphysical springboard in mind, what did my experience in Pho Boston say about the place Pho Boston?  I did indeed feel a bit awkward at first, and I think that says something about the place - when eating Pho at a Pho restaurant, there’s a certain order things are presented, and eaten, and mixed.  That is not to say I would have been kicked out if I just dumped everything together and asked for a fork for my noodles, but there is a certain method, and it helps to know that method before breaking the rules.

Sitting at a sushi bar is another eating event which assumes some knowledge of place and methodology, but that methodology may also be very different in the context of Masa, as compared to the context of a California Roll at the mall foodcourt.  Is there something about the “place” of a pizza parlour which says we must eat our slice from tip to crust, in that direction?  There is probably not something implicit in a pizza parlour’s physicality which prescribes that we eat pizza this way but again, part of my experience at Pho Boston was influenced by not knowing the social norms, and figuring out the rules myself.  I would argue that this sense of wariness in screwing my soup up very much influenced my own experience of the place I was in.

My experience at Pho Boston, I feel, I was an excellent introduction to the world of Pho and I’ll be back again.  I did notice other varieties included rare meats, ribs, and oh baby, tripe.  Maybe I’ll bring along some friends to check out some appetizers and spring rolls, too.  You’ll read about it here, but I think I will not warn them about the tripe before I order it.

Pho Boston

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