Description
Phuong Restaurant in Garden Grove is an old-school dive in Little Saigon, and most of the tables of elders will get an order of bánh hoi, a dish of noodle sheets. But Phuong’s most famous meal by far is the hu tieu my tho, a soup of kitchen-sink proportions, not just in size, but also in idiom. Hu tieu is a genre with a broth derived from seafood and pork stock, bobbing with clear, chewy tapioca noodles, and then a zoo of meats. Phuong packs in shrimp, fish paste, barbecued pork, even hard-boiled quail eggs, and you can order the soup with the broth in the bowl, or on the side, for optimal dunking. It’s Bootsy Collins in a bowl, the funk of all the ingredients boiling into one another as you accentuate it with scoops of chili and hoison sauces, plus pickled jalapeños and garlic.
