Our Favorite Pho Restaurant and Fun Friends

We are fortunate to live close to many good restaurants. Craig has been on the hunt to find the best pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) restaurant, and keeps coming back to this one. They do have delicious food! There is only one dish on the menu, beef pho, so this is where we go when one, or both of us, has a craving. It costs about $2.33 for one bowl, so we go there quite frequently. We cannot make our own food for that price.

It is close to our home, and the best way to get there is to walk. We love walking through our neighborhood. There is much to see and we find many fun people, some who have become friends, on the way. In the video at the end of this post you will see some of what we see as we walk, as well as meet some wonderful women who gather for lunch almost daily.

This is what Craig and I call a three wall restaurant. There are three walls, and the fourth is open to the street. They are usually higher end than a two wall, and always higher than a food stand that does not have walls, and most of the time no place to sit and eat.

You order your food from the woman in front of the blue wall, then you walk over to the red table to get your greens and other things to put in your soup, or eat on the side before you sit at a table.

This is where you order your food. You just need to tell them how many bowls you would like to buy.

My lunch 😋 You add the sprouts, basil, and lemon juice to the soup and eat the long beans on the side. You can put the peanut sauce and whatever else you want on a piece of the lettuce and eat it. There are condiments on the table. Craig and I both like to add chili oil to make it spicy. 

In the video you can see snippets of where we walk to the restaurant. These were taken on our way home. Most of the roads are dirt, but the bigger road where you see a motorcycle and a car driving is paved. The roads look bad here because they are putting in flood abatement. It is very much needed, and should be helpful for the next rainy season. They are also upgrading the road surface to asphalt on some of the dirt roads.

The fun and kind women stopped us a few months ago to ask if we wanted to join them for lunch. We had already eaten, so told them we were ເຕັມແລ້ວ (full already). They told us that maybe their food would be too spicy for us, so when we told them we like spicy food, one of the women laughed and said ບໍ່ເຜັດ ບໍ່ແຊບ (not spicy, not delicious). It is something we have heard many Lao people say, and I decided I wanted that on video, but did not think of it until after we had left. So some time later I had Craig take a video of them as they were saying it. Unfortunately I had to coach them this time 😅 So that is what they are saying - "if it is not spicy it is not delicious."