Kim Ma street hides a gem in its lower laneway. Miss the turn and you’ll drive right past it – the entrance dips below street level. Skip the car, grab a bike or taxi instead. Parking’s a nightmare here.
The first thing that hits you isn’t the aroma – it’s the choreography. This kitchen runs with the precision of a Swiss watch: Plastic curtains keep the AC working overtime. Staff with headset mics calling out orders. No chaos, no shouting. Just smooth efficiency. The open kitchen behind glass shows everything – they’re not hiding anything here.
Here, they have fresh phở noodles made on-site. They steam rice sheets like bánh cuốn, hang them on steel rods to cool, then stacked and hand-cut into wide, substantial strands. It’s labor-intensive work that you would expect to see from shops that only specialize in making phở noodles, but here it’s non-negotiable.
Then the bowl arrived. Those thick, wide noodles threw me off at first. I grew up on thin noodles with chicken phở. My palate has been trained on delicate thin strands, so I needed a moment to adjust. But these handmade beauties have the perfect chew, the right firmness. They don’t soak up the broth like thin ones do, so you taste each component separately. The noodles. The broth. The chicken. All standing on their own merit.
The broth achieves that holy grail of phở – clarity with depth. Each sip delivers layers of clean, concentrated chicken essence without any muddiness. The chicken itself tells a story of selective sourcing; they partner with a single local farm, refusing to compromise on quality for convenience.
My wife and I trek across Hanoi weekly for this. WEEKLY. In a city where stellar food lurks around every corner, where good phở shops almost outnumber traffic lights, that says everything.