?> {"id":4199,"date":"2010-11-09T21:48:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-10T02:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.twofatbellies.com\/?p=4199"},"modified":"2010-11-11T11:44:34","modified_gmt":"2010-11-11T16:44:34","slug":"pho-grand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twofatbellies.com\/2010\/11\/pho-grand\/","title":{"rendered":"Pho Grand"},"content":{"rendered":"
So I realize that I’ve been neglecting this blog in terms of NYC restaurant posts. I’m really far behind on posting, considering I have yet to write about the fantastic anniversary meal that Josh and I had at Eleven Madison Park in May. Yes, May. It’s bad. I have restaurant pictures going back farther than that as well. Between work and all the travel posts, I really haven’t put much thought into the NYC restaurant scene, although we have been eating at lots of new places. So I’m going to start mixing in regular posts with the travel posts, and hopefully that will force me to start covering more ground. At the rate I’m going, I’ll still be writing about Peru for the next six months!<\/p>\n
In terms of some good meals we’ve had lately, I had an odd hankering for Vietnamese food one weekend so we made the trip down to Chinatown where there are several highly touted Vietnamese restaurants. My hankering was odd because I’ve never really eaten Vietnamese food, aside from a bowl of pho in San Francisco five years ago, plus all the banh mi sandwiches we eat. But I had seen pictures of Vietnamese dishes in several blogs and I just got an uncontrollable craving to try some for myself.<\/p>\n
We ended up at Pho Grand, a restaurant that I’ve read about, plus it was super close to the subway. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the restaurant had received an “A” rating on their health inspection, not that a lower rating would have stopped us from going.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n The menu was massive, and I started to feel a bit overwhelmed because I had no idea what to order. We selected a pho, since the restaurant has “Pho” in its name. For our other dishes, we ended up choosing “Cari Ga”, or curry chicken, because we’ve still been searching for a curry chicken that is similar to the dish we had on Sentosa, in Singapore<\/a>. Lastly, we ordered “Bun Cha Gio Thit Nuong”, which is grilled pork and spring rolls with lettuce on rice vermicelli.<\/p>\n The pho we chose was the “Xe Lua”, which was beef soup with rice noodles and six different cuts of beef, including brisket, tripe, tendon, eye of round, navel(?) and frank (flank?). It came with a little dish of fresh bean sprouts and basil that we mixed in, plus a wedge of lemon that we squeezed into the soup. It was an enormous portion and we dug in right away. The slices of rare beef on top were super tender but my favorite pieces were the chewy bits of tendon and tripe. The soup itself was flavorful yet light, and the lemon juice and fresh basil really brightened it up.<\/p>\n