Thursday, January 13, 2011. Beef Stew And Happy Pancake At Pho Nola. Twenty-one degrees this morning, as the predicted long cold snap hit bottom. But my defenses are up and I have nothing to worry about. Why the dog Susie likes to spend the entire night outside on a night like this is a mystery to me.
Cold weather adds to the appeal of Vietnamese restaurants and their enormous bowls of beef broth, noodles, and various meats. People have been raving to me about Pho Nola. It opened a year ago on Transcontinental at Veterans, next to the Asian market, in a space that has been a few other Asian restaurants. I've tried to go a few times, but those somehow were always the nights when the Marys would call me to take them to dinner. (They will not even consider Vietnamese.)
I finally made it there tonight. I got a table at the farthest remove from the front door. Which, of course, is a single door. Not a problem most of the year, but very much a problem when it's in the thirties outside and the wind is blowing. Fortunately for me, the restaurant wasn't thickly populated.
Nice-looking, spacious place. Most of the customers are just what I'd expect: young singles and couples sans kids on dates. The menu is the most common one among local Vietnamese cafes in being dominated by the endless variations on the makings of pho. The usual appetizers filling the gaps.
I came here with an interest in a dish my radio listeners have been raving about lately: banh mi bo kho, or Vietnamese beef stew. Those who are strongly concerned with eating The Latest Thing will want to know that this is it. In many places, bahn mi bo kho is replacing pho as the favorite dish of the cognoscenti.
The first two words of banh mi bo kho suggest a kinship with the wildly popular Vietnamese poor boy sandwiches of the same name. "Bahn mi" means bread, and one version of this dish is indeed served with French bread baguettes. It becomes much like a French dip-style poor boy sandwich, without the dressing, but with the gravy.
I had it the alternate way, in a bowl with rice noodles. The size of the portion served by Pho Nola is out of all proportion to any hunger I've felt in a long time. There had to be a pound of beef in there, and a pint or more of sauce. Carrots and the noodles (which stuck together, making the eating difficult) completed the dish.
What intrigued me was the sauce. It looked and tasted like a broth made for a thick meat gumbo, with extra-strong beef stock and a dark roux. But there is no roux or anything like it. The thick texture comes from the natural juices thrown off by the beef as it's seared, plus a substantial amount of tomato sauce. Convergent evolution? It tasted eighty-five percent like the beef stew at Mandina's, but with enough sauce that it was practically a soup. And very good. The beef was bottom round, I think, or perhaps chuck. It was very tender and flavorful.
I would have eaten more than half of this had I not started with a large appetizer. My first Vietnamese meal, in the early 1980s, began with what Kim Son called a "happy pancake." It's not universally on menus, but when I see it I often order it. Pho Nola calls theirs a Saigon crepe. It looks like an omelette, but there's no egg involved. The crepe is made mostly of rice flour and coconut milk. It's cooked until crisp around the edges, then folded over sprouts, pork, onions, shrimp, and a few other things. This one was the prettiest I've had, with a pile of greens and herbs filling the other semicircle of the plate. This is surely divisible by two to four.
The server was a young Vietnamese woman with complete knowledge of the food and how to pronounce it all, but without a trace of accent. This is the second generation of Vietnamese in New Orleans, and they have taken over the dining rooms, making things easier on their customers. This has pushed their parents, aunts and uncles into the kitchen. I hope these young people are learning how to cook all this stuff. But I'll bet it's very different twenty years from now.
Pho Nola. Metairie: 3320 Transcontinental. 504-941-7690.
