Table 2: Of Sundays and Pho

Two in the Morning

It's 2am and I'm cataloguing a pho shop from memory.

Not because anything happened. Because in eight hours something will, the same thing that happens most Sunday mornings, and I'm awake anyway. The occasional insomnia. So instead of sleeping I'm rehearsing the route, the way you run your thumb over a key in your pocket.

Some of it I know cold. Some of it I only think I know. The underground parking lot used to be run by U-Space, but I'm fairly sure it changed hands at some point. The elderly man who makes balloon animals outside the coffee shop, I haven't seen him in a while. I don't know if he's still there.

I'm writing all of it down anyway. Partly to document a ritual. Partly, I suspect, to see how much of a place I actually hold when the place isn't in front of me. The broth is eight hours away. The catalogue starts now.

The Route

10:30, wake up. 10:45, leave home. My mom drives; we head toward Nanjing Sanmin, park at B3 of the underground lot, ride the elevator up into whatever the sky is doing. By then it's 11:20, and we walk.

Turn left. Cross the road. Keep going. On the left there's Heshun Buffet, one of those Chinese buffets, and every single time I make the same joke about hippos, because their names share a first sound in Chinese and because I like hippos. My mom has heard this joke approximately two hundred times. She has stopped reacting, which I've decided to read as acceptance.

Straight on under the shop signs, a stir-fry joint on the right, then the corner with the umbrella shop and Sugarcane Mama, which sells sugarcane drinks I sometimes pick up on the way back. Turn right. Walk forward. On the right is the coffee shop corner where the balloon man should be, twisting dogs and swords out of thin air, sometimes handing them to kids. Should be. See above.

And then, near the corner but not quite at the corner, the destination: a pho shop called Hanoi Hefen. Literally, Hanoi Pho.

It opens at 11:30. We arrive at 11:20 in case the line gets long. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't really matter.

Outside the Door

It opens at 11:30, which means it opens at 11:35. Maybe the broth wasn't ready.

The cook is usually the reason and the evidence. He steps out of the cooking station, which sits right at the shop's absurdly tight entrance, walks to the actual corner of the street, and smokes. Fancy watch. A bunch of keys hanging off his pants. Glasses. Looks not friendly but is friendly. We wait outside in his general downwind, collecting a little secondhand smoke as a cover charge. Then he drinks some water, walks back in, and tastes the broth from a small stainless steel bowl. When the bowl says yes, the line opens.

The owner is an older lady who, from bypassings and by-hearings, lives out in Wanhua and commutes in. There was also the Sunday of her son's high school entrance exam, when the shop opened anyway. Draw your own conclusions about devotion.

Before opening, there's the menu system, which nobody understands on the first try. Each clip holds a whole stack of order sheets; you're supposed to take the entire clip, not peel off one sheet and pass the rest down the line. I duck under the crowd-control barrier to grab them. We've taught this to strangers behind us more than once, handed them their own clips, explained the protocol. Other times we watch people do it wrong, sheet by sheet down the queue, and say nothing. We know. We're just too annoyed to ask. Once a man from Sweden struck up a conversation while we waited, delighted that my headphones came from his hometown. The line makes small worlds like that.

Inside

Table 2 over table 9, always, because table 2 is on the right and the space is wider. This is the kind of preference that sounds insane until you've held it for months, at which point it's just true.

The shop barely has decorations. They did renovate at some point, but the new paint job carefully circles around the old celebrity signatures on the wall, which I find funnier than any decoration would be. The tables are separated by acrylic dividers left over from quarantine, repurposed without comment. Some tables are fitted for three when honestly they should fit two.

Each table carries its kit. Two shared sauces, one dark, one light. Lemon slices that are perfect because they have none of those internal peels, so they squeeze really nicely. Freshly cut chilies that smell exceptional. Thai basil in a box rather than in the soup by default, which I deeply appreciate, being a lifelong non–Thai basil person. Small paper saucers. Tissues. Disposable chopsticks and stainless steel chopsticks, side by side. I don't know why they need to coexist, but they do coexist.

My ritual: take a paper saucer, add two spoons of chili from the bottom of the jar, squeeze two lemon slices over them, work it together with chopsticks. The soup arrives. First sip clean, before anything. Then the saucer goes in. Perfect balance, at least to me.

The pho with the best beef I've had anywhere is 160 NTD. We add an extra portion of beef, which brings it to 260, and I'll allow myself exactly one price reaction: still absurdly cheap. My mom gets hers without onions now; before we knew you could order it that way, her onions simply migrated to my bowl. I never minded. We get the vegan spring rolls, because the shrimp version is fried and the fried version isn't good, and the owner yells toward the back of the store, politely yelling, not absurdly yelling, how many rolls for which table. They arrive rolled minutes ago. Two extra get packed for my sister.

One Sunday evening, after two full days of debating at NCCU, the three of us showed up at 7pm to a packed shop. You walk in, they give you a number, you wait outside for the yell. I waited five minutes in a crowd that looked like thirty, and my number got called, ahead of pairs who'd arrived earlier. I'm still 50% sure she recognized us, after all those Sunday mornings of being first through the door. Only 50%. I'm keeping it there.

The news plays on the TV in the back. There's no music, just the owner on the phone with takeout orders, very occasionally apologizing for her own fumbling, and once, for reasons I cannot explain, rounding a bill from 990 down to 900. My mom and I talk about the broth, which tastes different every week. Sometimes sweeter. Sometimes meatier. We've stopped treating this as a flaw.

Shamelessly

Here is where I'm supposed to establish credentials, so, quickly: I've had pho in Brooklyn. I've had pho in Hong Kong. I've had pho all over Taipei, and my dad, a bigger pho fan than me, has had more authentic bowls than I ever will. The whole thing started with him, actually, picking up takeout broth from this shop and adding his own beef to it, until one day we just went for lunch and the ritual installed itself.

Recently we tried an upscale place. 270 a bowl. More noodles, sure. Worse beef, and far less of it. Spring rolls with hard peels, which I didn't mind but my mom noticed, and my mom noticing is the more reliable instrument.

I know Hanoi Hefen isn't authentic Vietnamese pho. It's probably their take on it, calibrated over years to a Taipei street corner, and it's probably the least authentic pho I know.

But I still love it. Shamelessly.

Across the Street

Daylight, as promised, filed its corrections.

This week ran backwards. My mom, after two Sundays of me being away in Hong Kong, misremembered the opening time as eleven, so we arrived early and did Dejeng first instead of after. I abandoned my usual yogurt oolong for a honey-apple bitter-gourd green tea, a decision I stand behind about 70%. She ordered two spring rolls instead of one by mistake; my sister had said she didn't need any this time, and we packed the extra for her anyway.

The weather outside was terrible, so we stayed in Dejeng, leaning against the railing they have inside, drinks in hand. And that's where I saw him. The balloon man, still at the coffee shop corner, under a burning July sun, mostly just sitting, the way I suspect he mostly just sits, doing it for the love of the game. Occasionally a balloon leaves his hands and lands in a kid's. I watched him from across the street until 11:20, then we walked.

The parking lot is still U-Space. We still pay 50 dollars every time. 2am got that one wrong too.

At the shop, a group of elderly people was already waiting. For once, we were second in line. The broth was meatier this week. For once, I didn't finish the noodles.

Then we walked back toward B3.

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Acknowledgments

• Title image: L'Angélus by Jean-François Millet, Public Domain, Link. Millet painted two figures pausing their labor to observe a ritual timed by a bell they've heard a thousand times, heads bowed over ordinary ground. Some Sundays the ritual is the broth.