Yesterday I was sent out to Maple Ridge for a late afternoon meeting and not knowing just how long it would take me to get out into the far reaches of Maple Ridge, I left earlier than I needed and not surprisingly, I arrived very early. So what else to do than sample a pho joint?
This is how I ended up in Pho Song on Lougheed Hwy in the old part of Maple Ridge.
Seeing as it was a pho joint I felt it was important to sample their pho. I’m lucky I did. However, the funniest part of my visit was that this very soft voiced young Vietnamese lady came and took my order. She was very kind and helpful as she answered my questions. Then she walked over towards the door into the kitchen and that sweet voice barked out like an angry sailor, “MAAAA, I need a bowl of pho. NOW!!”
The pho I was brought had a rich, kind of deep and complicated in a good way, flavour. I asked the-once-again sweet voiced young lady how they made their broth so rich tasting and she laughed. She told me that many people comment on the flavour of their broth.
She answered my question by saying they make their broth stock the “old country way” by actually boiling beef bones. She added that many other pho places use powdered beef stock instead of the old school method because the cost of natural gas is so high that it makes it expensive to have large pots of bones boiling for hours on end. However, those boiling pots of bones are what makes their broth so complex.
Along with my $8 bowl of lean medium rare beef slices and rice noodle soup I decided to sample a Vietnamese sub sandwich. I ordered the beef sub. The sandwich alone is not very large and works well as a starter.
In honour of the sandwiches French roots, the Vietnamese sub sandwich is served in a piece of crispy French bread. I often marvel at how these weak looking pieces of bread are able to heroically hold together their tasty interiors. A classic example of that was the bun that the hamburger at the original Save-on-Meats was served on. The French bread at Pho Song was equally heroic.
I appreciated how each bite of the sandwich had a contrast in flavours between the marinated beef and the delicately sliced carrots, cilantro and leaf lettuce. My only complaint was that when I bit the beef in the sandwich I had one of those bites where all the meat comes out in one clump. The sandwich was still very delicious but it leaves the rest of the sandwich kind of empty of the meaty fillings.
Bottomline, if you are in the outer reaches of Maple Ridge, try Pho Song for a delicious bowl of rich bowl of pho.
