Photo: Zane Fischer
Pho Kim is no one-trick pony. Try the vermicelli patties.
It doesn’t take much in Santa Fe to turn drought into abundance. Fans of affordable, flavorful Vietnamese food who have filled from the tap at Lan’s Vietnamese Cuisine and Saigon Café can now add Pho Kim to the once half-empty cup that may soon runneth over.
Sure, slow and sleepy Santa Fe has yet to be saturated with hole-in-the wall banh mi sandwich shops, but a dedicated pho palace is a step toward culinary civilization here in the Southwestern frontier. Pho Kim has taken root where Cyclo—an alleged Vietnamese restaurant with the best of intentions—slowly withered.
Cyclo should have thrived in the Solana Center, a place packed with hungry laundromat denizens, CrossFit junkies in need of a carb fix and La Montañita Coop regulars looking to slum, but its offerings always tasted like generic Chinese food, with none of the spry palette, contrast and temperature shifts that Pho Kim hurls out like so many Austroasiatic syllables.
In contrast to Cyclo’s inscrutable, vaguely bicycle-oriented artwork, Pho Kim has more generic decorating sensibilities. There is an Asian-style wall painting, a shrine to good fortune, several bizarre figurines, a pirate ship and a cornucopian helping of Dahn Yoga pamphlets.
The menu, also in the best tradition of generic Asian offerings, is staggeringly long and numbered to save Western tongues from embarrassing and incomprehensible pronunciation mishaps. No. 1, goi cuon, is an appetizer of spring rolls. No. 124, com ca fillet chien xa ot, is a tilapia fillet with lemon grass and rice. There’s a lot in between.
But most importantly there is pho. The timing is very Santa Fe: Just as the pho craze has faded from the coasts, it has finally landed here. Pho Kim offers a dozen varieties of the traditional beef and noodle soup, spanning Vietnam’s geography with varying ingredients. The straightforward pho tai ($7.99) is a bowl of noodles and slices of paper-thin, rare steak, which continues to cook as it sits in the broth. A side dish with chiles, cilantro, sprouts and other fixings allows diners to tailor each bite of pho to personal perfection. It’s also possible to have well-done, even crispy nuggets of beef or to add fatty morsels of brisket, tendon or tripe to the basic pho. Remember, “pho” is pronounced “fuh,” which makes it fun to think about how to say “Pho Kim.” It’s like the Vietnamese can’t help but yank the chains of the eternally immature Americans.
As much as one might wish for pure dedication to pho, it would be unreasonable to dismiss Pho Kim’s full slate of offerings. At least 17 of the many, many dishes are strictly vegetarian by default, and there are treasures aplenty to be had when one goes digging through the encyclopedic menu. The bahn hoi cha gio ($7.99), a generous helping of egg rolls laid over a patty of steamed vermicelli noodles, goes down like an evangelical revival of the tastebuds. The spicy egg rolls, sliced into bite-sized morsels, taste like illicit passion draped in the warm hug of thin, fresh noodles and bright fish sauce. The aura of fresh lettuce, onion and carrot doesn’t hurt either. It’s like a good kind of mouth polygamy.
Four people can happily stuff themselves for approximately $30 total at Pho Kim, even less if you’re in the mood to share from the menu of pornographically girthy banh mi sandwiches. Indeed, there’s a selection of the legendary Vietnamese sandwiches available and, indeed, they are big enough to, for example, taunt a Viagra-dependent friend%uFFFD%uFFFD—
and Pho Kim if he can’t take a joke.
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