The pho bo is tasty at the Pho Binh soup restaurant, but in truth no better than at other places in Vietnam. The broth is hearty, the noodles are chewy, the small slices of beef tender even if the accompanying pieces of lime and chili pepper looked a bit tired. The price is right: 22,000 dong ($1.30).
But the pho bo, however filling, is not the reason to visit the Pho Binh, or Peace Soup, restaurant. Instead it is a historic site as Ho Chi Minh City (don’t say Saigon), along with the rest of the country, celebrated the three-day Lunar New Year holiday known as Tet.
This year’s Tet holiday, which began on Thursday, was the 40th anniversary of the Tet offensive launched against US and South Vietnamese forces across what was then South Vietnam. The series of attacks demonstrated to the world the capabilities of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, who eventually lost so many soldiers that their victory was political, not military.
Upstairs above Pho Binh, the Tet offensive was planned and ordered to begin. The rooms over the restaurant served as a safe house for leaders of what they called the resistance.
Ngo Toai, one of those leaders, worked downstairs, serving pho bo to customers who included American soldiers from the US Military Police headquarters about 330 feet, up the street from the restaurant at 7 Ly Chinh Thang.
It is now, and probably was then, an ordinary street in a backwater neighbourhood of Ho Chi Minh City: uneven, broken sidewalks, a hair salon, a shop selling bridal gowns, another with electronic gadgets.
At the curb, people sell watermelons, dragon fruit and packets of rice wrapped in leaves. A string of Vietnamese flags, red with a yellow star, hangs overhead. Like everywhere in the city, the street is full of honking scooters, carrying riders somewhere or, it often seems, nowhere except into the next wave of traffic.
The Pho Binh restaurant has a number of plaques celebrating its history. It is a small place with about 10 tables and the soup caldron out front, the kitchen out back and those rooms above.
The few members of the staff appear to be family. They are friendly to foreigners and know why they have dropped by.
Before she served the soup to two American visitors this week, a young waitress produced a plasticised clipping of a Reuters interview with Ngo Toai in 2000, when he was 87 years old.
Showing his medals, he told how, three days after the Tet offensive began, he was arrested, nearly shot, tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was freed in 1975, he said, when the North won the war.
The waitress also offered a photograph album showing Toai beaming with American visitors, obviously former soldiers. His role in the war was well known by then and the restaurant is, after all, in guidebooks.
Another album contained inscriptions from visitors, not all of them Americans.
One tourist, Mie from Denmark, had written: “What an intriguing world. Having Pho Bo with Coca Cola in a Communist place that used to serve American soldiers. If we could all be that accepting and live in harmony, who knows what we could make of the world.”
The New York Times
