The history
of pho

Origins and the great debate

Pho is a Vietnamese soup dish consisting of broth, rice noodles, herbs, and meat – usually beef, and sometimes chicken. Pho is a popular food in Vietnam where it is served in households, street-stalls, and restaurants nationwide. Residents of the city of Nam Định were the first to create Vietnamese traditional pho.

The exact birthplace of pho is contested. Most food historians place its emergence in the early 20th century in Nam Dinh province, south of Hanoi, though Hanoi itself is often credited as the city that shaped and spread it. What is agreed on is that pho as we know it is relatively young -- barely a hundred years old -- which makes its global reach all the more remarkable.

The dish likely developed from a convergence of Chinese noodle soups already present in northern Vietnam and the French colonial appetite for beef, which made cattle bones newly abundant and affordable. Before French occupation, beef was rarely eaten in Vietnam; cattle were working animals. The colonizers changed that, and the leftover bones went into Vietnamese pots.

Pho is barely a hundred years old. Its global reach in that time is one of the more remarkable stories in food history.

The French colonial fingerprint

The word pho itself may trace back to the French pot-au-feu, the classic boiled beef and vegetable dish that French colonizers brought to Indochina. The pronunciation shifted through Vietnamese phonology, the vegetables disappeared, the spice profile transformed entirely, and what emerged was something unrecognizably Vietnamese -- yet the debt to that colonial encounter is baked into the name.

Others argue the name derives from the Cantonese fen, referring to rice noodles, brought by Chinese migrants who had long been present in northern Vietnam. The honest answer is that pho absorbed both influences and became its own thing -- which is perhaps the most Vietnamese thing about it.

French influence also made beef culturally accessible. Street vendors in Hanoi in the 1910s and 1920s began selling bowls from mobile kitchens -- ganh pho -- shouldered wooden frames with a broth pot on one end and noodles and garnishes on the other. Pho was, from the very beginning, street food.

The great divide: Hanoi vs Saigon

The partition of Vietnam in 1954 split the country politically and, with it, split pho into two distinct traditions. When over a million northern Vietnamese fled south, they brought their pho recipes with them. What happened next was not assimilation -- it was evolution.

Northern pho, pho Bac, is spare and precise. The broth is clear, deeply savoury, subtly spiced. The noodles are wider. The garnishes are minimal: a few spring onions, some fresh chili, that is about it. Condiments at the table are limited. The broth is expected to stand entirely on its own.

Southern pho, pho Nam, is more generous and more exuberant. Saigon brought bean sprouts, Thai basil, culantro, hoisin sauce, and sriracha to the table. The broth is slightly sweeter. The bowl is bigger. The herb plate is abundant. It is a more welcoming, more forgiving bowl -- and it is the version that most of the world knows, because it is the version that Vietnamese diaspora communities brought abroad.

Pho and the Vietnamese diaspora

The fall of Saigon in 1975 triggered one of the largest refugee movements of the 20th century. Vietnamese communities established themselves across North America, Australia, France, and beyond -- and they brought pho with them. The dish was not just food. It was continuity. It was home in a bowl when home no longer existed in the way it had.

The first pho restaurants outside Vietnam were not trendy destinations. They were practical, cheap, family-run operations in the Vietnamese neighbourhoods of cities like Los Angeles, Toronto, Houston, Sydney, and Paris. They fed a community. The outside world barely noticed.

That changed slowly through the 1990s and rapidly through the 2000s. Food media discovered pho. Anthony Bourdain ate it on television. The internet gave food culture a global nervous system. Pho crossed over from ethnic enclave to mainstream restaurant menu to home cooking project -- and it did so while managing to remain, in its best versions, entirely itself.

Pho crossed over from ethnic enclave to mainstream menu -- and managed, in its best versions, to remain entirely itself.

Pho today

Today pho is eaten on every continent, interpreted by chefs who have never been to Vietnam, and debated passionately by people who have. It appears on Michelin-starred menus and in food courts. It is made with chicken, with tofu, with wagyu beef. It is instant-packaged and freeze-dried and sold in supermarkets.

None of this has diminished the original. In Hanoi, the old pho shops still open before dawn and sell out by mid-morning. In Ho Chi Minh City, the herb plates are still piled high and the broth is still simmered overnight. The version that matters most is still the one in the bowl in front of you, wherever you are.

What makes pho endure is not mystique or scarcity -- it is the opposite. It is a dish built on patience, on cheap cuts of meat, on bones and water and time, on spices that cost almost nothing. Its genius is that there is nowhere to hide. A great bowl of pho is great because of attention, not ingredients. That accessibility -- the sense that anyone could make this if they were willing to spend the time -- is part of what makes people fall in love with it.