No.188 and No.2

We love Vietnamese food but we could never order the items by name without totally mangling the pronunciations. To make things worse, some waiters in Vietnamese restaurants speak heavily accented English; so we always embarrassingly do the gweilo thing, we order by the numbers.


Pho Hua is our newly discovered Vietnamese restaurant. It is conveniently located within stumbling distance just down the street from Devil’s Den and across from the old stand-by, Nam Phoung. Added bonus point: The younger waiters are all bilingual.

The No.188


No.188 is a huge meal in a bowl of rice Vermicelli on a bed of shredded lettuce topped with shredded pork, charcoal grilled shrimp and pork with chopped scallions and peanuts sprinkled on top. It comes with a bowl of dipping sauce (nuoc cham) consisting mainly of fish sauce, vinegar, sugar, line juice, garlic, chili pepper, and spice. Along with the invented-in-America Srirachi sauce, No.188 can make any hungry person happy. I also swear that the nuoc cham and the Srirachi sauces could make anything taste good.

I love Vietnamese spring rolls. I like them more than their Chinese cousin. No.188 comes with a miniaturized version of the regular size spring roll that is served in the restaurant. We have had the regular version which didn’t excite us at all, but the smaller brother was totally delicious and crispy. My favorite topping was the freshly char-boiled pork. It’s a savory thin piece of pork with a light sweetness, still giving out the aroma of the charcoal and burnt meat when it arrived at the table. Dip that in the nuoc cham sauce, you’ll be in heaven. My other love was the grilled beef in grape leaves which I ordered as an extra for this bowl. The grape leaves retained all the juice of the beef during the grilling process that then exploded in the mouth after biting into it and let out all the essence of the beef into the sensory receptors. Yes!

The No.2

What makes a bowl of pho? It’s the soup! For a restaurant in which half of its name is the thing that can make or break its reputation, it has done a pretty good job with this soup base. No.2 is just a base pho with thin slices of steak (put into the bowl raw and cooked by the hot soup during its way to the table) and brisket. It comes with the usual compliments of bean sprouts, mint leaves, line, and jalapeño slices on the side. Along with the Srirachi and the Hoisin sauces, this is a perfect comfort food for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Hot Coffee with Condensed Milk


There are only a few words that can adequately describe France’s contribution to the Vietnamese: black, caffeine, intense, sweet; delicious! Everybody should have one of these little cup size metal drippers at home just in case there is a Vietnamese coffee emergency.