By 6:30 in the evening, the dining room at Pho Cyclo on Capitol Hill is loaded with customers. They are crammed into the booths along the walls, pressed against the glass of the Broadway-side windows that fog with the steam coming off their bowls of pho.
Joshua Huston
Looks pretty peaceful, eh? Not usually.
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Arriving parties tangle with departing ones at the door, and there seems to be very little in the way of organization on the floor. Servers seat people at random—pointing them toward tables, sometimes forgetting menus, utensils, and people altogether as they work through a backlog of parties that never seems to slacken. There are no quiet moments here, only those less busy and those more.
The servers seem not to notice. They move (or don't) at the same languorous pace regardless. They bring menus (or don't), chopsticks (or not), and sheets of seasonal specials which seem to have no relation to the season. BBQ short ribs, if they had a season, would be a summer thing, wouldn't they? And I had no idea there was a special time of the year for chow mein.
If you're lucky, you might ride a wave of sudden, whiplash seatings straight from door to table, and be eating in minutes: your order taken, processed, and filled in accordance with no rational, decipherable timetable, with no rule except that pho will always come fastest—sometimes before drinks, napkins, chopsticks, and pho spoons. If you're not lucky, you may linger, feeling forgotten, by the door and hostess stand, cold drafts on your back, until some server or another registers your presence. You may get a table and then wait, hungry, for 10 or 20 minutes, as tables seated after you are serviced with an efficiency that seems almost insulting, as though keyed specifically to drive you insane.
Pho is one of the fastest of fast foods on earth. At a good shop, you can be seated, be served, eat, pay, and be gone in 15 minutes, with barely time to breathe. For an unlucky customer at Pho Cyclo, that basic interaction might take, oh, I don't know . . . let's say an hour and 44 minutes, including the nearly 10 minutes he had to sit staring at his rapidly cooling bowl of pho tai bo vien, waiting for someone to bring him something to eat it with, and seriously considering just picking up the whole bowl in his hands and drinking it.
Sometimes I am the lucky guy at Pho Cyclo; most of the time I am not. But I keep going back—keep rolling the dice and taking my chances and not scheduling anything for an hour, minimum, on either side of a meal there—for one reason: The pho is just that friggin' good.
Something else about the place makes the wait and complications worthwhile. That would be Ms. Lien—the owner, head chef, and developer of the menu at Pho Cyclo. Ms. Lien also owns, operates, and writes the menu at Huong Binh in the International District, my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in the city ("The Joy Duck Club," May 5, 2010)—a place as disparate from Pho Cyclo as two things ostensibly the same can possibly be.
Huong Binh is confounding in its strangeness no matter how comfortable you are with the food being presented or how many times you have settled into its tiny, crowded dining room. Cyclo is aggressively welcoming —if not always accommodating—and easy, offering nothing from the far reaches of the Vietnamese canon stranger than a bowl of noodle soup or a glass of boba tea.
At Huong Binh, the best dishes are the most complicated: the hacked-up ducks with a Martian produce section's worth of accompaniments, the jellied pancakes dusted with shrimp flakes and scallions like shards of jade. At Cyclo, simpler is better: a bowl of broth, a squeaking meatball, a stick of shrimp blistered from the heat of the grill, and some rice noodles to go with it.
Huong Binh is there to serve its I.D. neighbors and fellow travelers, to feed families and friends who might also happen to need a bag of preserved tropical fruit or can of lychee soda from the coolers and shelves that line the walls, to warm refugee hearts with the flavors of home. Cyclo, on the other hand, is kinked like a 101 course in Vietnamese Cuisine for Amateurs. To wit, Goal #2 on their website's "About Us" page: "Create a dining experience that introduces and encapsulates the Vietnamese culture."
Theirs is the street food of Hanoi and Saigon and Hue City—something Ms. Lien knows well, since she learned to cook from her father, who in turn learned to cook during the French adventure in Indochina. There are banh mi sandwiches on French bread during lunch, and glasses of Café du Monde over ice, sweetened with condensed milk. Everything else is the equivalent of fast food from an age before fast food was invented, and from a place where things rarely move fast at all.
The appetizers are forgettable, just spring rolls, egg rolls, and three different kinds of salad—of which the lettuce wrap is the only one worth trying, and even then only if you really have a thing for ginger, straw mushrooms, and eating with your hands. The core of the menu looks, at first glance, to be long, complicated, and all-encompassing, but is really just 40-odd variations on a five-note theme.
