Pho fight: Our 40-bowl quest to find the best Vietnamese soups in Hampton Roads

When it comes to pho, you want the soup that was born yesterday.

Vietnam’s national dish is one of the world’s great culinary inventions, a long-simmered beef noodle bowl prized for its clarity and aromatic balance, and the boomingly rich flavor of marrow drawn from the bones.

It is almost certainly Vietnam’s best known culinary export, an easy-to-love soup whose low cost and apparent simplicity belies laborious hours of preparation.

At restaurants committed to bringing out the soup’s full flavor, its preparation almost always begins the previous day. The soup’s bone-rich beef stock may simmer for as many as 24 hours with charred ginger and onion, its cooks skimming the fat again and again until the broth becomes a thing of heartwarming purity.

And in a pandemic year when so many of life’s simple enjoyments vote only absentee, pho is one of the few winter comforts that’s blessedly portable, not to mention healthful.

Pho is best tried fresh from the pot, of course. But because the soup’s vital essence stems from its broth, it can also make for a wonderful takeout food, poured steaming hot over thin, flat rice noodles packed separately. (Though, note you should also take care to reheat the broth a bit at home before mixing it with noodles, to get the full benefit of the soup’s volatile aromatics. Hot pho doesn’t just taste better: It tastes different.)

And so as the mercury dipped in winter, we embarked on a weeks-long quest to find the finest pho in Hampton Roads — visiting 18 pho shops from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach, while also taking care to also order one or two of each spot’s other brothy specialties. Top contenders were tried more than once, sometimes three times. In all, we crested 40 versions of soup.

We kept our tasting criteria somewhat broad, since pho can vary widely in Vietnam, from the saltier and simpler North to the sweeter and bolder South — and frankly, from family to family and sister to brother.

But the soup should always be clarified rather than murkily brown, with the aroma and beefy flavor of bone marrow and a lovely fatty sheen on its surface that doesn’t devolve into greasiness. The flavors should be balanced, a symphony of aromatics that doesn’t too strongly tip toward licorice-like star anise or sharp ginger or any other single flavor.

The noodles should be lightly toothsome, and also the right kind of noodle — points were docked for spots that threw round vermicelli in the bowl. And the meats should be tender and juicy and fresh, whether expertly cooked tendon or luscious meatball or rare beef flank.

As a rule, we didn’t add garnishes until we’d tasted the broth on its own. But we did also assess the freshness of the sprouts and basil and jalapenos, and dreamt fondly that a local shop would someday offer an option on culantro. We didn’t care at all about sriracha or hoisin, which were left where they sat.

And after all of that, over a month or more of slurping, my favorite three bowls of pho turned out to be the same three already recommended by our newspaper’s Vietnamese-born art director, Thế Phạm — a dedicated souphound who diligently chases down every hot tip on local pho, and who in better years makes trips to Houston’s vibrant Vietnamese restaurant scene to sample the wares.

To arrive at our final rankings, Phạm and I picked up soups from all three contenders on a dull and rainy winter’s day, and tasted their broths blind and head-to-head. In the end, the winner wasn’t the one either of us predicted. But after trying the winner again, I found the results of that tasting heartily confirmed.

Here are the best spots in Hampton Roads to pick up a warming bowl of pho, alongside a couple other wonderful Vietnamese soups we found along the way.

Winner: Saigon One Pho

4221 Pleasant Valley Road, Virginia Beach, 757-226-7969, saigononepho.com

For 20 years now, Dung Diep and Mimi Dao have been making their rich and wonderful bowls of pho in Virginia Beach, soaking the beef bones and then simmering them in stock for as long as 19 hours on low heat, with herbs and spices and the light sweetness and mellowness of vegetables.

Dao says the secret to the soup, in part, is “good bones.” She also checks her stock constantly for cloudiness as she cooks, skimming away impurities to keep the flavor clean.

The broth blooms with a depth unparalleled by almost any other local bowl, its surface shining with an iridescent shimmer of marrow and fat.

But the depth also stems from a mastery of herb and spice. Saigon One’s southern-Vietnamese-style soup is a delicate balance of cinnamon and cilantro and ginger and onion that swirl into a harmonious whole without any one flavor coming too strongly to the fore. It is a treasure chest of flavor that keeps revealing new secrets with each sip.

Of all broths we tried, Phạm said, Saigon One’s had the richest flavor, a balance of beefy boom and vegetable sweetness, with nary an off note. It was similar to the bowl his own family might make as a celebration meal.

“It tastes like when I go to a friend’s house,” he said. “That’s how it tastes, because when cooking for friends and family you tend to add more bones, and simmer a little longer.”

Just don’t go looking for that wonderful pho at Diep and Dao’s original location on Newtown Road — which still bears the Saigon #1 name, but now has new owners and less accomplished soup.

After expanding to their location on Pleasant Valley Road four years ago, the pair found the stress of running two restaurants to be too much. And so in 2019, they sold the original location, and settled into a slower pace at their cozier new location, where they make their soup in small batches.

The care they take with each soup shows up not just in the pho, but everywhere on the menu, including a toothsome and shrimp-laden banh canh soup made with thick tapioca noodles. Their weekday lunch specials, meanwhile — samplers of soup and spring roll and grilled meat — are some of the most generous meals you can find anywhere in the city for $8.95.

“Soup’s good, man!” called out regular customer Ralph Bess during one of our visits. He said he’s been a pho devotee ever since serving in Vietnam decades ago, and that he followed Diep and Dao to the new Saigon One location after they sold the old spot.

“I’ve tried soups all over,” he said. “Theirs is the best.”

Runner-up No. 1: Pho 78

4239 Holland Road, Virginia Beach, 757-495-3007, pho78vb.com

An eight-minute drive from Saigon One in the Treemarket complex, Pho 78 is a much vaster eating hall, founded 16 years ago by a pair of brothers. Almost always, you can expect to see Vietnamese customers greeted warmly by name by owner Tri Tieu — who possesses perhaps the most distinctive style, and the most impressive head of hair, in all of Virginia Beach restaurants.

The Tieu family pho recipe, which hails from Ca Mao on Vietnam’s southern tip, has been served by his family in restaurants all over the country, said manager Nghia Tieu. He arrived in Virginia Beach three years ago to help out his brother after running a restaurant in San Francisco for 30 years. Other family members serve the soup in Arizona and Florida.

The recipe traveled for good reason: Their broth is the only one to rival Saigon One’s for that delicate balance of beef and vegetable depth, cooked 24 hours to achieve its roundness of flavor. The restaurant turns out as many as 200 bowls of beef pho each day, from a pot so large that Nghia Tieu jokes “a person could climb in there.”

Indeed, only a light sour note during our blind tasting kept their thumpingly good bowl from topping Saigon One’s excellent version; before the tasting, both Phạm and I initially suspected that Pho 78 might come out on top.

But don’t sleep on their other soups. Their chicken-brothed pho ga, hu tieu and bun rieu seafood soup are also among the best you’ll find locally — though Phạm said he misses the bun rieu that used to be served out of the Greenbrier location of Pho 79, which is unrelated to Pho 78 despite its similar name.

As at many Vietnamese restaurants, the number in Pho 78′s name stems from family significance: The Virginia Beach restaurant’s founders were numbers seven and eight out of 14 siblings. The restaurant’s name also denotes the year that one of their brothers came to the United States, Nghiao Tieu said.

“1978 is the year he left our country to find freedom,” Tieu said.

Runner-up No. 2: Pembroke Pho 79

4816 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach, 757-687-7844, pho79virginiabeach.com

From nine locations of Pho 79 in Hampton Roads, the Vo and Vuong family have likely served more soup in Southeastern Virginia than any other clan in the state.

But not all locations of Pho 79 are created equal.

We’ve tried five of the Pho 79 locations, named after the year its owners came to the United States. And we found them to vary in the character of their soups — though Pembroke manager Phu Vuong says the family recipe should be preserved at them all.

Still: We always kept coming back to the original hundred-seat Pembroke location, one of the earliest pho restaurants in Hampton Roads when it opened in 1999.

There, you can pick up a bowl that is a straightforward blast of beefy beef, simmered overnight and flavored with seven different aromatics. It’s less delicate and round than the versions at Saigon One and 78, perhaps — a little saltier and full of some serious oomph. It is not a fragile flower: It is meaty flavor delivered with a sledgehammer.

The soup’s recipe, according to family lore told to a Pilot reporter in 2000, was a gift given in gratitude by a South Vietnamese military officer to a friend who helped him escape the country. That friend, in turn, passed on the soup to the Vos.

“Just like some of the masters of karate, they have a secret technique,” Johnny Vo told The Pilot then. “When they get old, they want to pass it along. He had no one to pass it along to.’'

The technique is still a secret, as far as we know. But you can eat the soup anytime you’d like.

Best Peninsula pho: PhoDiner

8135 George Washington Memorial Highway, Yorktown, 757-807-2130, phodinerva.com

Our three favorite bowls of pho, it turned out, were concentrated in a relatively small area of central Virginia Beach. Pho spots on the Peninsula are a bit sparser, leaving aside multiple locations of Pho 79.

Our favorite bowl turned out to be the newest of them all, at a Yorktown Vietnamese restaurant called PhoDiner — founded by owner Jeffrey Nguyen in November, after he’d originally opened (and closed) a franchise of troubled Israeli burger spot BurgerIM in the same location.

There, the soup is prepared from stock once every two days, with a many-hour simmer — an aromatic and pleasant broth that nonetheless doesn’t quite offer the depth of our three favorites. Where PhoDiner’s soup distinguishes itself best is in the quality of its meat, from perhaps my favorite meatballs in the region to beautifully managed beef tendon. The rare-steak tai arrives brazen in its pinkness, flash-cooking in its hot broth like beef shabu shabu, and with that same delicate tenderness.

Bun bo hue: Pho Viet 1/Hot Pho

5266 Fairfield Shopping Centre, Virginia Beach, 757-965-7798, facebook.com/hotphovb

Pho is the Tom Hanks of Vietnamese beef noodle soups, universally likeable. But bun bo Hue is spice and funk and weirdness and amplitude. It is James Brown and David Lynch, a beefy roil of blood cube and pork hock and fermented shrimp and lemongrass — proudly loud in its pleasures and yet balanced among salt, fat and funky savor.

While most local Vietnamese restaurants tone down the soup’s chutzpah, Pho Viet owner Viet Nguyen does not — other than to leave some of the chili sauce on the side to account for different heat tolerance. Dump it all in, and you will bask in glorious chili-slicked heat and funk, in a marrow-rich beef soup simmered for 10 hours.

The soup’s famously divisive blood cubes, eschewed at most other local Vietnamese spots, are here tender and delectable rather than rubbery — a result, Nguyen said, of long marination before being included in the soup.

Most of the customers who roll in for the bun bo Hue are Asian, Nguyen said. But perhaps because of a profusion of cooking shows depicting far-flung flavors, lately he’s been surprised to see Americans coming in to order the soup as well.

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“Most Americans, they don’t know about it,” he said. “Most only know about pho. But now they’ve started ordering bun bo Hue, too.”

Duck noodle soup: Pho Dalat

836 Eden Way North, Chesapeake, 757-233-9995, facebook.com/PhoDalat

Tiny Pho Dalat, owned by the Le family from the central highlands city of the same name, serves a wonderful version of a soup rarely seen in Hampton Roads.

Mi vit thiem — duck noodle soup — is a Chinese-Vietnamese hybrid of a soup, with a generous portion of crispy-skinned and marinated duck layered into fatty-sweet chicken broth. The soup arrives here with bok choy and carrots, plus a side of house-made hot sauce with smoky depth.

Goodness, it’s good — a tour of textures from still-crisp carrot, to chewy and springy egg noodle, to the far more complex and fatty textures of crisped duck. It’ll be difficult not to think of that duck anytime I’m near the Greenbrier Mall.

Honorable mentions for specific tastes: If you’ve got a sugartooth, the beef pho at Pho Nguyen in Virginia Beach (2029 Lynnhaven Parkkway, 757-524-4040) retains its balance while running a bit sweeter than the other soups mentioned here. And if what you’d like from pho are herbal aromatics so pronounced they’ll make your car smell like a licorice store at Christmas, stop in at takeout-only Vietnam 81 in Portsmouth (4411 George Washington Highway, Portsmouth, 757-487-4167).

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com