But some chains are worried about customers’ unfamiliarity with the dish. Big Bowl, owned by Chicago-based Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Inc., with eight units in Illinois, Minnesota, and Virginia, bills itself as serving fresh Chinese and Thai, yet squeezes in a dish that’s neither. Recognizing pho’s potential to wow palates, but acknowledging that it’s still an exotic dish for most of America, Big Bowl calls pho something that most Americans readily identify with: chicken noodle soup.
Dubbed Vietnamese on the menu with “pho” in parentheses, it’s the best-selling soup in some units including the company’s highest-volume restaurant, in Minnesota, as well as its flagship unit in downtown Chicago, besting Chinese sweet and sour and dumpling noodle, says Matthew McMillin, executive chef/partner and vice president of culinary. The larger of the two pho sizes, selling at $5.95, is 12 ounces of broth, 31⁄2 ounces of rice noodles, and 3 ounces of white-meat chicken, for a good value, McMillin says, adding that pho is seldom ordered outside a combo that might include a potsticker, egg roll, or side salad. Pho is executable in Big Bowl’s high-volume, high-menu-mix environment thanks to the proprietary chicken broth McMillin created. “I worked on it for a year and a half. It’s the purest broth there is,” he says. McMillin is toying with testing a flank-steak pho and, typically chef-like, is already dreaming of how dripping fat will make the beef broth even richer-tasting.
Metaphor for Innovation
Jim Griffin, who is neither a chef nor restaurateur, but merely a lover of pho, worked for David Geffen and Geffen Records in Los Angeles in the 1990s. In 1994, he led a team that distributed the first full-length commercial song online, by Aerosmith. During those years he’d enjoy a bowl of pho at his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. People who couldn’t reach Griffin during the week could always track him down on Sundays at Pho 87.
By the end of that decade, as many as 70 or more musicians, managers, Web site designers, radio personalities, federal lobbyists, cable-content deliverers, entrepreneurs, and filmmakers would join Griffin at Pho 87 on any given Sunday to discuss new developments and legislation affecting digitizing and delivering music. Most everyone would chip in to pay the tab that might total $1,000 or more, but when Griffin picked up the difference, thanks to the economy of pho, that wasn’t a huge expense. Anyone, regardless of his or her financial situation, could talk music with Griffin and company over a bowl of pho.
Those Sunday meetings at Pho 87 served as the launchpad for what is now a global community of “pho kitchens” that commence regularly at pho restaurants on every continent except Africa and Antarctica and at which music technologies are discussed.
“There’s a peculiarity of pho kitchens that lends itself to conversation,” says Griffin, who is now managing director of OneHouse LLC in The Plains, Virginia, and who often attends a “pho kitchen” in Washington, D.C. “They won’t bring the bill to the table. You have to go up and ask for it or wave to your server. Pho kitchens often have big, long tables. It’s never expensive.”
What technologies have come out of these so-called pho kitchen gatherings?
“There’s been a lot of them,” Griffin says. “I would say that anything involved with digital music has probably come through a pho kitchen. We have a couple thousand people in our listserv, and that’s why we call it ‘pho.’ It’s a metaphor for what we do. Each bowl is an opinion, and you can stay as long as you want.”
“The best time to enjoy pho is early in the morning, when the broth is still fresh.”