Anyone hunting the best Vietnam food in Manhattan eventually ends up below street level, because a great deal of the East Village's small restaurant stock is in basements. Ha Noi House is one of them, and it serves pho in the northern style — a clear, unadorned beef broth with very little on top — which surprises people who learned pho from the southern version and its mountain of garnishes.
A dish you think you know is worth re-meeting in its original form. Ask Karpo where the regional version of a familiar dish is served near you.
Northern pho versus southern pho
Pho comes from the north — from Hanoi and the Red River delta, developed in the early twentieth century — and the northern version is defined by restraint. A clear beef broth, flat rice noodles, thin slices of beef, spring onion and a little coriander. That is close to the whole dish.
The southern version, which spread across the world, adds a great deal: hoisin and sriracha, a plate of bean sprouts, Thai basil, lime and chilli to add yourself, and a sweeter, more heavily spiced broth. Both are legitimate and the southern version is what most people mean by pho.
The practical implication is how to eat the northern one. Taste the broth before you add anything, because in the northern style the broth is the dish rather than a base for it. Adding sauce to a clear pho is not a crime, but it is roughly equivalent to putting ketchup on a consommé, and you will not taste what the kitchen spent twelve hours making.
What makes a broth good
A proper pho broth is beef bones simmered for many hours with charred ginger and onion, star anise, cassia, coriander seed, clove and black cardamom, skimmed continuously to keep it clear. The clarity is not decoration — it indicates that the broth was simmered gently rather than boiled hard, which changes both texture and flavour.
The spicing should be perceptible and not dominant. Star anise in particular is easy to overdo, and a broth that tastes strongly of aniseed has been pushed too far. What you want is a beef broth with a warm spiced edge, not a spiced tea with beef in it.
Charring the aromatics is the step most home cooks skip and the one that matters most. Blackening the ginger and onion over a flame before they go into the pot produces the depth and faint bitterness that separates a good broth from a thin one.
Ordering beyond the noodles
The rest of a northern menu is worth attention. Cha ca, turmeric fish with dill, is the other Hanoi signature. Banh cuon, steamed rice sheets rolled around minced pork and wood ear mushroom, are delicate and rarely found. And bun cha, grilled pork in a warm dipping broth, is the everyday lunch of the city the restaurant is named after.
Coffee is not an afterthought here either. Vietnamese coffee is robusta rather than arabica — stronger, more bitter, higher in caffeine — brewed slowly through a metal filter onto condensed milk. Egg coffee, whipped yolk and condensed milk over coffee, is a specifically Hanoi invention that came out of a milk shortage in the 1940s and is closer to a dessert than a drink.
Order one at the end rather than with the meal. It is sweet, dense and strong enough to reorganise your afternoon.
The basement restaurant, as a category
Manhattan's below-street-level restaurants exist because the rent is lower, and the East Village has more of them than anywhere. They tend to be small, warm, low-ceilinged and invisible from the pavement, which means they are consistently under-visited relative to their quality.
The habit worth developing in this neighbourhood is looking down as well as along. A great many of the best small rooms here are reached by four steps below the pavement, with no signage visible from across the street, and walking the same block twice at different levels of attention turns up places you have passed for years.
They are also a genuinely good option in bad weather. A small warm basement in February is a considerably better proposition than a fashionable room with floor-to-ceiling glass.
Reading a pho menu
The cuts are usually listed and they are worth choosing rather than defaulting. Tai is rare steak, added raw and cooked by the broth as it arrives, and it is the standard. Chin is well-done brisket, softer and more deeply flavoured. Nam is flank, gan is tendon, sach is tripe, and bo vien are beef meatballs with a characteristic springy bounce.
A combination bowl gives you several of them and is the right first order, because the interest in a bowl of pho is largely textural — soft brisket against springy meatball against gelatinous tendon — and a bowl of one cut is monotonous by the halfway point.
Chicken pho, pho ga, is not a lesser option. It uses a completely different broth and is common in Hanoi, and in a kitchen that makes both properly it is frequently the more delicate and interesting bowl. It is also the better order in warm weather.
Practical notes
Ha Noi House is a small below-street-level Vietnamese restaurant in Manhattan's East Village serving northern-style pho — a clear, restrained beef broth with minimal garnish. Taste the broth before adding anything; in this style the broth is the dish. Judge it on clarity and on spicing that supports rather than dominates. Order banh cuon or cha ca alongside for the rest of the northern repertoire, and finish with Vietnamese coffee or the Hanoi egg coffee rather than taking it with the meal. The neighbourhood has many similar basement rooms worth looking for below pavement level.
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Ask Karpo first
The best small rooms in a dense neighbourhood are frequently the ones you cannot see from the pavement. Ask Karpo what is worth eating on the blocks around you, including the basements, and what to order once you are down there.
