Pho. Hot stuff in Clerkenwell
‘Most Vietnamese restaurants don’t feature northern England accents on the menu. Certainly not from the husband and wife team running the place. In fact, they’re not even Vietnamese, (although the chef is). Clearly Pho is not your average Vietnamese restaurant.
Pho (pronounce it ‘feu’ as in the French for ‘fire) does not, as so many Vietnamese restaurants do, offer a massive menu in many ways indistinguishable from a Chinese joint. ‘No’, says Steve Wall who along with his wife Juliette is the founder of Pho. ‘We don’t see ourselves in direct competition with those guys, fundamentally we’re different because we’re Britain’s first and only specialist Pho restaurant.’
So what’s Pho? Basically it’s a traditional Vietnamese noodle dish made from white rice noodles in a clear beef broth, with thin cuts of beef (steak, fatty flank, lean flank, brisket), meatballs and other ingredients such as onions, coriander leaves, ngo gai ("saw leaf herb"), mint, basil, lemon or lime, bean sprouts, and chili peppers. In Pho, the last four items are provided on a separate board, which allows customers to add as many or as few condiments to the broth soup as they desire. The broth is generally made from beef (and sometimes also chicken) bones and spices, and generally takes several hours to prepare. It is, needless to say, quite delicious.
In Australia Pho is big, with numerous chain restaurants. You’ll find Pho restaurants in Paris, too. But none in London or the UK, a fact that Steve and Jools leapt on. Steve explains, ‘In the U.S.A there are hundreds of Pho restaurants. In Orange county alone there is a massive community of Vietnamese, over there Pho split off, rather like Sushi did from Japanese food, to become a phenomenon on its own. We looked at that, and looked at the market over here, and saw it was going toward fast, casual dining with a healthy edge.’ So why no Pho already in the U.K?
‘It was surprising, ‘Steve agrees. ‘ We couldn’t figure for the life of us why there was no specialist Pho restaurant over here. It’s Vietnamese street food at its most basic. Our compact menu, has twenty five items which helps us to maintain high quality.’ And quality is very high here, partly down to Steve’s own tastes. ‘We based a lot of on our own principles,’ he points out. ‘The design, the casual atmosphere, even down to the meatballs because I gag on gristle, can’t stand it! So our meat balls are top quality all the time.’
So how did two people with good jobs change everything to run a Pho restaurant in Clerkenwell?
‘Before I was in marketing,’ confirms Steve, ‘a sponsorship specialist on the client side. Jules was into food and drink marketing on the agency side.’ Like a lot of people they decided to go off travelling. ‘Not just to travel,’ Steve points out ‘It was also about brainstorming ways out of the daily grind. Vietnam inspired us and the more we researched Pho the stronger the idea got.’
Research was key because neither Steve nor Jules wanted to do anything stupid. ‘That’s right,’ he laughs, ‘because, you know, sat on a beach having a cool idea is one thing, and I had a lot of hare-brained ideas in retrospect, but this one stuck. We could see it working in France and in Australia already, we could see that it was a business model that made sense.’
So you in fact abandoned one busy job, then in came back to work harder? “ Steve laughs at this, ‘well I think it’s about achieving something, the hours are huge but at the end of the day in five years time we hope to look back and say wow, look what we’ve done!’
‘We did a massive amount to make up for a lack of experience,’ Steve explains. ‘Jules has a slight background in catering from a few years back, but really the strength of the initial concept and the amount of planning that went in has done us well.’ It hasn’t been easy, of course. ‘No the learning curve has been quite steep’ he chuckles. ‘Every day we learn something I think, we’ve learnt people will put up with the ten minute wait to get freshly cooked food even when it’s their precious lunch hr, they will queue and they will wait because what we serve is better than a typical fast food noodle bar. The fresh herbs, the taste, it’s all worth waiting for.’
All in all Pho has been a fantastic experience for this likeable team. Steve agrees. ‘Half the time we think the place is perfect, the other half, when lunchtime queues are out the door we wish we’d gone bigger. At the end of the day queues are always good. Our design was all about making it cosy, making it look like somewhere you wanted to come in.’
It certainly is; the Pho, the fresh platter of herbs, the great taste and the Vietnamese beers all combine to make it the perfect place to eat lunch or dinner informally. I think we’ll be seeing Pho’s all over London soon.
