Pho Tai (越南牛肉粉專門店)

The menu of this new Viet eatery enthusiastically coaches us to enjoy our pho noodles in the proper Vietnamese manner - throw in beansprouts, various herbs and squeeze some limejuice into your bowl. To this end, Pho Tai provides a sorry-looking basket of withering leaves and sprouts on each table. Not an encouraging start (although I suppose a lot of herb baskets in Hanoi wither in the tropical heat as well). The English name of the restaurant is Pho Tai, Vietnam’s national dish, so logically, a bowl of noodles with rare beef in a pipin’ hot broth should logically be the best thing on their menu. Unfortunately not. The broth was horrible, and the rice noodles were Cantonese-style, not Viet at all. That’s like using macaroni for laksa; simply unthinkable. Their lemongrass pork chop is pretty decent, though, with a big cone of rice drenched with sweet and savory soy sauce, so go for that instead. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we say here, as the hordes of hungry office workers will still queue up for the atrocious pho they slop out there.