I acquired this recipe from a legendary pho restaurant in Paris. It makes enough to feed a small army, but I thought it would be special and unique to include the history of this restaurant and the recipe in this book. For a simplified beef pho soup recipe, see here.
Recipes are the most precious assets of any restaurant, and that’s especially true in a pho restaurant. Even when you’re friends with the owners, it’s not easy to get their special recipe.
Stefan Leistner, author of the German cookbook Asia Street Food, is a good friend of mine. We met in Hamburg and several times in Da Nang and Hoi An, where he travels every year to learn about Vietnamese food. At a cookbook fair in Paris, he met Thierry Bertman, who shared this recipe from Pho Vidéo, handwritten in Vietnamese. Pho Vidéo had the facade of a video store, but illegally sold pho instead. Stefan and Thierry longed to have an English translation of the recipe, and that’s how I came to see it.
