How long has it been since you've had Pho?
If you're not familiar, it's a Vietnamese noodle soup, and is very delicious. Here's my bowl from last night, with tofu. I don't know if you can tell, but this is a huge bowl, and I devoured most of it.
Get a load of this article about Pho:
In the 1950s, writer Nguyen Tuan was condemned as a bourgeois reactionary and banned from publishing after he wrote an elegy to pho. Writers were supposed to focus on the glorious onward march of the revolution, not trivialities such as food. Mr. Tuan's essay was in fact a sly criticism of the Communist Party and the damage its thought police were inflicting on Vietnamese culture. Framing his attack in terms of pho was an effective way to tap into a deep vein of Vietnamese identity.
The Communist government closed most pho stalls back in the 1950s when they represented the insidious force of private enterprise. In the 1970s and 1980s, food was so scarce in Hanoi that most of the speakeasy soup joints that served pho in a semiclandestine way closed down...
Can you imagine having to sneak into an illegal back alley dive for some soup? Crazy.
If you're not familiar, it's a Vietnamese noodle soup, and is very delicious. Here's my bowl from last night, with tofu. I don't know if you can tell, but this is a huge bowl, and I devoured most of it.
Get a load of this article about Pho:In the 1950s, writer Nguyen Tuan was condemned as a bourgeois reactionary and banned from publishing after he wrote an elegy to pho. Writers were supposed to focus on the glorious onward march of the revolution, not trivialities such as food. Mr. Tuan's essay was in fact a sly criticism of the Communist Party and the damage its thought police were inflicting on Vietnamese culture. Framing his attack in terms of pho was an effective way to tap into a deep vein of Vietnamese identity.
The Communist government closed most pho stalls back in the 1950s when they represented the insidious force of private enterprise. In the 1970s and 1980s, food was so scarce in Hanoi that most of the speakeasy soup joints that served pho in a semiclandestine way closed down...
Can you imagine having to sneak into an illegal back alley dive for some soup? Crazy.
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