Good choices: Noisy crepe with vegetables; shiitake sweet potato rolls; crispy jasmine rice cake; all three pho (soups), made with vegetables, chicken, and beef; bun beaux (barbecued beef) over rice vermicelli.
The brief chronology of Vietnam on the back of the Pho Republique menu ends in 1954, when the French were defeated. But this restaurant doesn't aspire to Vietnam in the 1950s; they're looking at something much earlier in the French colonial era - somewhere around the turn of the century.
Once you leave Central Square's scruffy neighborhood behind and step inside Pho Republique - with its bamboo charm, beaded doorway, and Old Hollywood effect - you're in for a treat. This is a clever American businessman's idea of Vietnamese cuisine, sanitized for the eating public, and purged of cheesey linleum and cigarette smoke.
Owner Jack Bardy hopes Pho Republique is a prototype of many little Phos to follow. He has chef Didi Emmons on board to streamline the menu. Though some are protesting the lack of Vietnamese-born cooks on the premises, and the fact that there's no mention of the devastating war, my feeling is, don't judge a soup by its politics. Eat and enjoy yourself if you can.
The traditional Vietnamese soup is called pho, pronounced fah, and the claim on this menu is that it evolved from the classic French pot au feu. Both consist of a potful of meat and vegetables in lots of broth. Pho comes with salady things - bean sprouts, fresh cilantro, aromatic Thai basil, and lime - so the diner gets warmth, crunch, and loads of nourishment all at once. The pho-feu connection is certainly in name only. One imagines colonial French sipping a bowlful of pho and pronouncing it just like their pot au feu. In fact, pho-like soups were made all over Southeast Asia long before the French colonists arrived.
Chef Didi Emmons makes her stocks for pho in the French style, she says, caramelizing onions and celery first to add sweetness to the broth, which gets its richness and body from chicken, beef, and pork bones. These giant bowls ($8.25 to $8.75) are loaded with noodles - rice or egg, as you prefer - and vegetables. The vegetarian pho contains wild mushrooms, sweet potatoes, and lime leaf. Chicken pho is made with spinach, leeks, and tomatoes, with roasted vegetables and thick slices of poached chicken. Beef pho is simpler, with spinach, tomatoes, and tender beef. To boost the flavor and delight the diner, you can order a shot (50 cents each) of fresh ginger puree or lemongrass red curry paste to stir into your pho. This is glorious food.
Before pho comes noisy crepe ($5), with batter made from rice flour, coconut milk, and yellow mung beans. Noisy and messy would be a better description, as this big, thick pancake is filled with sauteed vegetables. Pieces of pancake are meant to be wrapped in lettuce leaves before dipping into a traditional Vietnamese fish sauce. The single problem with this Frenchy-Vietnamese cooking is managing to eat dishes like these with chopsticks. You can't, so you do it the old-fashioned way. Fingers to mouth.
All of Pho Republique's ingredients are beautifully fresh, which makes the salads especially nice, like a red leaf lettuce, watercress, and cucumber salad with roasted shallot dressing, and a red cabbage salad with avocado and orange juice vinaigrette.
Jasmine rice cake ($5.25), with its red pepper sauce, is crisp outside, protecting the aromatic rice grains within the little cake. Bun beaux ($8.50), succulent morsels of meat on cool threads of rice vermicelli, tastes of peanuts, mint, and lime.
At lunch, Pho's menu shrinks to two sandwiches, the three phos, and the splendid shiitake sweet potato spring rolls, which you dip into cilantro and peanuts. It's hard to go wrong here. You should wish this place and its offshoots well. I can't think of anything nicer than driving all over town and seeing pho become the new fast food.
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