For some, Phở is a highly anticipated, borderline rapturous dish to devour. For others, it’s 100% pure comfort food. For the husband and wife duo behind Việtvana, it’s a passion rooted generations deep and manifested each and every day in their restaurants.
Each bowl of phở is piping full of time-honored traditions, well-honed culinary skill, fresh ingredients, and a lot of love. It’s why the tantalizingly slurpable soup is so palpably restorative. Eating a bowl of phở from Việtvana is as close to a visit to Sài Gòn as many Atlantans will get. But why is that?
It begins with the broth. To keep the costs low, many restaurants opt to make their bone broth with only beef hip bones to help keep costs low. But in Vietnam the bones are made from a mixture of bones from all throughout the cow. That compromise in variety sacrifices the integrity and flavor of the broth. As a consequence, other places compensate with additives like sugar and salt.
At all of Việtvana’s locations, husband and wife duo Dinh and Tranh stick to the culinary traditions they grew up loving. Every morning they go back to the stove and start to lovingly prepare their broth using a combination of ethically-sourced beef bones from throughout the cow. Those bones are then thoroughly cleaned twice, which later helps ensure the clarity of the broth as well as its balanced flavor. Only then do they begin to brew their broth, which cooks for four to five hours.
The ancestral learning doesn’t stop there, either. Every morning Dinh and Tranh also prepare the rice noodles that are brimming in each bowl of phở. It’s not a small matter, making that many noodles daily, but the effort is well worth it. The fresh noodles have less preservatives and unnecessary starches. That way not only does the broth maintain its clarity, but the noodles don’t continue to absorb the broth. This means the flavors of the soup don’t get muddied over the course of your meal. Every ingredient, from the meat and the bones to the final garnish, is sourced locally from Georgia farms, making for optimal flavor every time.
The phở served at Việtvana is a love letter to the traditions and flavors of Vietnam. We hope that the more we share about our process – the centuries of recipe development and love that is contained in each and every bowl, your overall experience is enriched.
