There are some foods that can either be done to perfection, where eating the dish can put you into unfoodlike levels of ecstacy - or they can be created so terribly that you feel you can never eat again. Pho Tai is one of those dishes. Having recently moved to San Francisco from Vancouver Canada, I’ve been noticing that a lot of my staples are not as easy to find done well, or at least done well cheaply. In East Vancouver you can’t trip down the street without finding several Vietnamese restaurants all filled with at least 25 types of Pho. My favourite is Pho Tai.

The perfect Pho Tai should have tender beef that doesn’t look fully cooked when the soup arrives at the table. The beef broth should be slightly brown, taste peppery with a bit of sweetness and once the hot sauce is added, the world could explode outside but your belly would sustain your spirits for at least a day before you noticed the apocalypse.

So this begins my Pho Tai Attack and first stop is Zadin.

Zadin
www.zadinsf.com
4039 18th St
San Francisco, CA 94114
(415) 626-2260

Small or large? Should be the first question.

There was no such option at Zadin.  They had definitely American’d up their menu for the citizens of the Castro District. They showed four soup options and then listed types of meats that you could have in them should you so desire. A bowl was listed as $10 with a charge of $1.50 if you wanted to split. Normally, a large bowl of Pho will be unweildy and far too much food for me. A small bowl, which is still too big usually costs $5- 6. This place had entres for $18 - 22, so not *too* spendy, but still a little fancy for my style of Pho. Mind you they did have a wall of wine all in their separate temperature units, so this was to be expected.

Yay for soup!

The pho arrived, with the beef already fully cooked. I imagine that it was raw before  it got to the table, but the place was busy. One of the delights of pho is poking the beef into the broth until you see that it has fully browned, so not ideal. However, they had the lime, bean sprouts (which I never eat) and basil for adding to the soup so I got to play with my food a little. They forgot to bring the hot sauce and I had to wait for the crowning glory, but they brought out a nice high quality sauce in a pretty dish, so all was forgiven. This was some good soup.

The broth would have been too timid without the hot sauce, little too much sweet, not enough pepper. However, the meat was really nice quality and super tender without having too much fat (sometimes a risk with pho).  I managed to eat it all reasonably quickly and achieved the ‘happy belly’ status I was seeking.  I will have to discover what hot sauce they use because I’m pretty sure that’s what sealed the awesomeness into their pho.

I would most certainly return to Zadin.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Restaurants. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.