The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: CHUA LAM’S PHO
“one of the great nibbles you’ve had in Hong Kong 2018”
November 7, 2018
As a wee lad your grandma took you to lunch, and love overflowing, told you to order whatever you wanted. You could have ordered a cheeseburger, pheasant under glass, lobster thermidor, anything. What did you order? For an appetizer, noodle soup. For a main course, noodle soup. Dessert? Noodle soup. Of course. Noodle soup runs in your veins. Thus you are qualified to state that the noodle soup, or pho, at Chua Lam’s Pho deep in Central, is superb. It’s broth sings in a clear sweet tenor to make your heart soar. It’s house-made rice noodles are chlurpy (chewy and slurpy) to make your inner child wriggle with joy. You can order extra noodles at no additional charge, prompting your inner child to jump from chair to chair and skip across tables. A tiara of raw beef, which cooks in the hot broth, and herbs with a squeeze of fresh lime is flavor full.
Chua Lam’s pho
But outstanding as the pho may be, it is not the main reason to visit Chua Lam’s Pho. Go for their pork neck appetizer, one of the great nibbles you’ve had in Hong Kong 2018. Pork neck is the skirt steak of pigdom, a little chewy, marbled, insanely delicious, and ignored by most meat mavens as mere scrap. (May this always be so. For the moment that pork neck is discovered, as skirt steak was, the cost will quintuple and, given the sad fact that pigs have only one neck, go scarce.)
Pork neck
Chua Lam’s Pho sears the pork neck to a caramel sheen, angle-slices it thin, and covers it in what seem to be crunchy bits of fried onion (like chopped Durkee’s French Fried Onions from a can). There is a side of sweet-spicy sauce (so good, you’d love to buy it to take home) of indecipherable ingredients that surely include fish sauce, chilis, sugar. Drumroll please, it is served with fresh shiso leaves as wrappers. This is what lofts this dish beyond the atmosphere, beyond low earth orbit, beyond high earth orbit, to the stars. All marriages should be so wonderful as fresh shiso leaves and Chua Lam’s Pho’s caramelized pork neck with their sweet-spicy sauce. There are only two shiso leaves to each plate along with lettuce and basil. Chua Lam’s Pho: go all shiso. You are commanded not to skimp. This is vital. The shiso is just too delicious for there to be any shortage. Lettuce and even basil are paltry by comparison. Shiso shiso shiso.
A slice of their pork neck within a shiso leaf. Insanely delish.
Their Rice Paper Salad Rolls -- taut with mango, fish, lettuce, and rice noodles – are almost but not quite equal to Chom Chom’s superb version. Perhaps it is the fact that Chom Chom batters and deep fries their fish, adding a textural layer, that makes theirs better. Yet, on the other hand, for this incremental lift, Chom Chom’s is about twice the price.
Rice paper salad rolls with white fish and mango.
Their Vietnamese Steamed Rice Rolls are folded packets of fresh rice noodle filled with a chop of meat and vegetable you can’t quite identify. Perhaps dried shrimp is an ingredient. Much as you like the fresh rice noodle, the dish is somewhat bland and doesn’t ignite your passions. You’d never reorder it.
Steamed rice rolls
Inexplicably, they serve a Banh Mi sandwich which is as bad as their pork neck is great. The bread is supermarket level and, what’s worse, stale or possibly over-toasted. The meat within is uninteresting and dry (a thin tranche of what you gather is pork-beef loaf). There is no pickled carrot or daikon, just a bit of cuke and cilantro. Chua Lam’s Pho: use superb baguette (which is very Vietnamese indeed), give a smear of mayo with sambal oolek (for moistness and heat), use a great protein (how about pork neck?), tint it with soy sauce or Maggi seasoning, add pickled carrot and daikon, a bit of cuke, cilantro, maybe some thin radish, throw in some jags of jalapeno pepper, and this dish will sing.
Chua Lam’s Banh Mi
You love the Colorful Coconut Ice for just the colors alone which remind you of a merry-go-round on a foggy Fall night. Carnival pink, blue, green, yellow, black nubbins layered at the bottom of a glass of snow-white coconut milk, a few black sesame seeds sprinkled atop a spire of shaved ice. It’s coconut delicious and the textures from beany to gelatinous (perhaps sago) are exciting sipped through a wide-bore straw.
Colorful Coconut Ice
It’s cheap. Going all rockets, dinner came to 320 HKD for two. Service is inattentive with few smiles. It’s crowded and not particularly comfortable. The savory items cry out for a good craft beer or glass of wine which are not available. But all this is as nothing compared to how delicious the pork neck is, by itself worth a journey. Go.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 3.5
Ambiance: 1
Service: 1
Overall Value: 4.5
CHUA LAM’S PHO
UG/F, 15 Wellington St, Central, Hong Kong