Pho Hoan Pasteur (Kingsway)
11443 - Kingsway, Edmonton AB
Pho Hoan Pasteur is now a mini-empire with locations in both Edmonton and Calgary. The original shop on Kingsway is a north side institution with a decades-long track record of fast, reliable service of tasty soups and noodle bowls. There is something about its spare, utilitarian dining room that puts people at ease. Scanning the restaurant you can tell many of the guests are regulars, that the guy in the corner has been ordering the #15 for years and knows precisely how many dots of Sriracha he likes in his pho.
And for a strip-mall restaurant in the Prince Rupert neighbourhood, it’s a busy place. If you arrive between noon and 1pm on a Friday, expect to wait awkwardly in the vestibule, and mind you don’t kick the altar on the floor. Hopefully you snag one of the ten booths that ring the room, or else you’ll be relegated to a central table. One of these is always blocked off from guests so at all hours of the day a woman can stand and patiently pick the leaves off branches of Thai basil. I don’t know if they are short on workspace in the kitchen, or if this is a scheme to fill the dining room with a sweet, minty perfume: either way, it’s wonderful.
Pho is beef noodle soup, and at any given restaurant all the pho menu items will have the same broth, the same rice noodles (thin, elegant, with a square cross-section), mixed and matched with different parts of a cow. Each restaurant assembles its favourite beef-bits in its dac biet, the house special. Pasteur’s comes with “steak, flank, tendon, and tripe”. I don’t quite understand the difference between the steak and the flank, but they are paper thin shaves of beef that are added to the bowl raw, and cooked by the steaming broth as you stir everything together. On good days the tendon has the yielding consistency of pâte de fruit. The finely sliced tripe has a mild crunch, and a textured surface reminiscent of well-used velcro.
For a modest surcharge you can add some springy beef balls to your soup, and then you have a pretty good spectrum of the textures that a cow can offer the human palate.
Edmonton’s pho cognoscenti will tell you that Pasteur’s house special is good, though definitely outstripped by a couple well-known cash-only joints over in Chinatown.
Tradition dictates that a pho shop's dac biet be this sort of best-of-beef assembly, but if it were my decision, Pasteur’s house special would actually be the #16: the “Beef Saté Pho with Peanuts”. It is savoury, sour, spicy, nutty, and herbaceous. It has big flavours, but they are so well balanced and so well integrated that the framework is like a boxer’s physique: muscular, structured, gorgeous. The finely ground peanuts give the broth a subtle suede-like texture on the tongue. I love this soup.
Pasteur makes a fine bun bo hue. This broth is also based on beef, but punched up with lemongrass, chilis, and shrimp paste. The rice noodles are a completely different style: chubby, white, spaghetti-like things with a distinct slipperiness. The meat garnishes are tender beef shank and pork balls bouncy enough to use in a squash tournament.
There are also noodle bowls. My go-to for years was a #35: vermicelli with grilled pork and spring rolls. This dish is a small essay in temperature, texture, and flavour: tepid noodles, cool succulent cucumbers, lightly charred meat, mouth-scalding shattering-crisp spring rolls, all baptized with a cup of sweet, briny nuoc cham. The vermicelli bowls offer the same clarity and balance of flavour as the soups, just with the volume turned down a few decibels.
