The search for the best Vietnam food in Los Angeles usually ends up pointing an hour south to Little Saigon, which is correct and not always practical. Closer to the centre, on the northern edge of Chinatown, Pho 87 has been serving the same bowls to the same neighbourhood for decades — and the neighbourhood itself has a history considerably stranger than most people realise.
Not every good meal is worth a two-hour round trip, and the version near you is frequently good enough. Ask Karpo what is genuinely worth eating within a short drive tonight.
Chinatown was moved here
Los Angeles Chinatown is not on its original site. The first one, established in the nineteenth century, stood where Union Station is now, and it was demolished in the 1930s to build the railway terminal. The community was displaced with very little compensation and considerable resistance.
What exists today is New Chinatown, opened in 1938 a short distance north — and it was the first Chinatown in America to be owned and planned by the Chinese community itself rather than by outside landlords. Its Central Plaza, with the neon, the gateways and the pagoda roofs, was designed as a commercial and cultural project by people who had just been evicted from their own neighbourhood.
That is why the architecture looks the way it does: it is a deliberate, self-authored piece of place-making from the 1930s, not a survival from earlier. Knowing that changes how the neon reads considerably.
Why a pho counter is here
As in San Francisco, a substantial share of the Vietnamese refugees who arrived after 1975 were ethnically Chinese, and many settled into existing Chinatowns where language and family networks already existed. Los Angeles Chinatown gained a Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese population, and with it a set of noodle shops and banh mi counters that have been there ever since.
The result is a small district where you can eat Cantonese, Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese food within two blocks, frequently from businesses run by families whose history includes all three. It is one of the more legible pieces of migration history in the city, written in restaurants.
It also means the food here is a genuinely different proposition from Little Saigon's. Smaller rooms, longer-established, less specialised, and serving a mixed local population rather than a large single community.
Ordering the bowl
Order a combination if it is your first visit — several cuts in one bowl gives you the textural range that makes pho interesting, rather than a single note. Rare steak added raw, brisket, tendon and meatball is the standard spread.
Taste the broth first, then adjust. The southern-style serve comes with a plate of bean sprouts, Thai basil, lime and chilli, and the correct approach is to add gradually rather than emptying the plate in at once — herbs added throughout keep tasting fresh, herbs added at the start wilt into the broth within two minutes.
Hoisin and sriracha are traditional in the southern serve and there is no reason to be precious about them, but put them in the small dish provided and dip the meat rather than squeezing them into the broth. That is what the dish is for, and it keeps the broth intact.
Making a walk of it
Chinatown is one of very few genuinely walkable districts in central Los Angeles, and it is small enough to cover in an hour. Central Plaza and the surrounding lanes are the historic core; Far East Plaza to the south holds a cluster of small ambitious kitchens; and the older herbal shops, bakeries and grocers are spread between them.
It sits directly beside Union Station, which is the best transit connection in the city and one of the most beautiful buildings in it — a 1939 mix of Spanish colonial revival, art deco and mission styles, with a waiting room worth walking into whether or not you are catching anything.
The Los Angeles State Historic Park is on the other side of the neighbourhood, a long strip of open ground on a former rail yard with a clear view of the downtown skyline. Between the station, the park and the plazas, this is a rare part of the city where two hours on foot makes sense.
The case for the nearby version
There is a habit in food writing of treating the definitive version of a dish as the only one worth eating, which produces a lot of long drives and a certain amount of disappointment. The definitive version is genuinely better. It is also an hour away, only open at lunch, and not available on a Tuesday when you finish work at seven.
A good local version eaten twenty times is worth more than an excellent distant one eaten once. That is true of pho, and of most other things, and it is the reason neighbourhood restaurants survive in a city where every ranking points somewhere else.
The useful position is to know both: where the best version is, for when the day allows it, and where the reliable nearby one is, for the other fifty weeks. Most people only ever learn the first, which is why they eat the dish twice a year instead of twice a month.
Practical notes
Pho 87 is a long-running Vietnamese noodle counter on the northern edge of Los Angeles Chinatown, a district built in 1938 by the Chinese community after the original Chinatown was demolished for Union Station. Order a combination bowl for the range of cuts, taste the broth before adjusting, add herbs gradually rather than all at once, and use the side dish for hoisin and sriracha rather than the broth. Walk the district afterwards — Central Plaza, the small kitchens at Far East Plaza, Union Station's waiting room and the state historic park are all within easy reach on foot.
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Ask Karpo first
The famous version of a dish is often an hour away and the good version is ten minutes away. Ask Karpo what is worth eating close to you tonight, and what is worth walking to once you have finished.
