For many years, Prague’s lovers of Asian cuisines were puzzled by the lack of Vietnamese restaurants in the center of the Czech capital, which has a sizable Vietnamese community. To get a bowl of ph?, the popular rice noodle soup from Vietnam, making the journey out to Sapa, the Vietnamese marketplace at the outskirts of the city, was unavoidable.
“For many years, people here, instead of opening a Vietnamese restaurant would open a Chinese restaurant, and you would have diners come in who wanted Chinese food, and it wasn’t prepared to Chinese taste because the owners were Vietnamese,” local food writer Evan Rail said. “And yet you had people who wanted Vietnamese food, but they couldn’t serve it because they were serving a ‘Chinese’ menu, basically international Chinese food of the chow mein and General Tso’s chicken [variety].”
Ph? conquers all
All that has been changing over the past five years. A number of new establishments offering Vietnamese classics like g?i cu?n, the refreshing summer rolls, or bún ch?, a vermicelli noodle bowl, have been popping up across the city. The latest addition is Pho Vietnam, which opened at Vinohrady’s náměstí Jiřího z Poděbrad just over a month ago. A picture of their bowl of ph? that a friend posted on facebook was immediately met with questions about the exact location of the restaurant — further proof that apparently, in the Golden City, this Vietnamese staple leaves no one cold.
When I asked the owners of Pho Vietnam, which offers both the beef and chicken variety of the popular soup, about summer rolls, another beloved Vietnamese specialty, they nodded knowingly (clearly, I was not the first customer to ask the question) and said that yes, those were going to be on the menu in about a week. When I ate there, the only Vietnamese fare on their menu was ph?. Bizarrely, the tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant also offers gyros, in addition to sushi and some Chinese-inspired dishes.
Since then, bún bo nam b? (grilled strips of beef over rice noodles) and nem sai gon (summer rolls with shrimp) have been added to the menu, which I learned from large pictures pinned to the entrance of the restaurant to inform passersby of the new offerings. Customer demand seems to often encourage initially hesitant restaurants owners to expand their menus.
“I think it started about five years ago. You would see the first restaurants that would put Vietnamese specialties on their menu, often sort of segregated, and they would maybe also have a list of Thai specialties,” Rail said. “But, recently, in the past few years, we have started seeing more and more restaurants that are actually saying, ‘We serve Vietnamese food’, and more importantly, you are starting to see Czech people embracing Vietnamese food as something that they have here that is really good.”
Prague food scene ever more cosmopolitan
Nineteen-year-old Thuy Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam and is currently studying Asian studies at Charles University, said that she believes Vietnamese restaurant owners were at first slow to offer their own cuisine because they feared it would not sell as easily as the more widely known westernized Chinese dishes that you can find across the city.
“I think it’s because they thought of Czech people with this kind of stereotype, that they didn’t actually care if it was authentic Chinese or not, that as long as it was noodles with stuff, it was OK,” she says. “Until not so long ago, people here only knew Chinese, they wouldn’t try Vietnamese, and Czech people have quite conservative palates.”
However, she says, all that is definitely changing now, with more and more restaurants adding Vietnamese fare to their menu. “I think that there is a new generation of young people who travel a lot and they want to discover what their fellow citizens eat,” she said. “And then there are some food bloggers who also did their part in introducing it to a Czech audience.”
A whole lot of noodles…
Among the most popular examples of Vietnamese cuisine in Europe and America is of course the already-mentioned ph?, a clear broth with flat rice noodles, fresh herbs such as cilantro and Thai basil, been sprouts, lime and meat. Chicken (ph? ga) and beef (ph? bo) varieties are usually available.
“I would describe it as a whole lot of noodles. Well, actually, Vietnamese is quite diverse,” Nguyen said. “Ph? is our national dish, more or less. It is made of flat rice noodles, with either chicken or beef, or both. And of course, coriander and a bit of lemon, which makes it really refreshing. But you also have rice cakes, and summer rolls and many other dishes. It is a bit lighter than Chinese, and we don’t use coconut, unlike Thai cuisine.”
While dishes like bánh mi, a Vietnamese sandwich that became a hot topic among food writers in the US last year, and bún ch?, a bowl of grilled pork and vermicelli noodles served with greens, are becoming more popular, ph? remains probably the single most widely recognized Vietnamese dish. With a cooking time of several hours, making an authentic version is quite a feat, says Karl Takacs, who owns Ph? Tau Bay, a Vietnamese that opened in the New Orleans metropolitan area in the early 1980s.
“Cooking Ph? is a long process, for me anyway,” Takacs said. “I cook roughly 38 gallons of ph? at a time. I always make mine from scratch and it will take me eight hours to complete. Certain ingredients will be added at specific times to create a rich, yet light clear broth. It is very important to screen your broth at the end to ensure its clarity.”
Takacs seemed hesitant to divulge more details of how exactly he makes his ph?. While the preparation differs from establishment to establishment, the Vietnamese soup, which some say is a potent hangover cure, generally takes several hours to make, with a cooking process involved enough to keep most home chefs from attempting to prepare it from scratch. All the better that finally Prague residents no longer have to make the far journey to remote marketplaces like Sapa to get their hands on a fragrant bowl of the delicious rice noodle soup.
A selection of Vietnamese restaurants in Prague:
Pho Vietnam
Slavíková 1
Prague 2
Ha Noi
Slezská 57
Prague 2
Tel.: 728 774 637
Pho Viet Hu’o’ng
Sokolovská 48
Prague 8
Tel.: 725 637 118
Remember Vietnam
Biskupská 5
Prague 1
Tel.: 602 889 089
Another great resource for finding out about Vietnamese restaurants in Prague is the facebook group Ăn Praha, a site for lovers of Vietnamese cuisine.
Sara Borufka is a Prague-based freelance writer
