Food review: Pho Fusion, Asheville’s new Vietnamese restaurant, offers a great soup, has some kinks to work out

From shewhoeats for Ashvegas:

First things first. For all the novices out there, pho is actually pronounced “fah.” Don’t worry, they’ll sell you a bowl no matter how you say it. Pho Fusion is setting out to teach us Ashevillians a thing or two about Vietnamese cuisine, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Many of us have waited with bated breath for a Pho shop to open its doors in these parts, and it’s finally here.  

The Good News: Gastronomically speaking, we are living in a post-Appalachian town. Nowadays our ribs must have word like “blueberry” and “chipotle” to augment them. Find me a mac n’ cheese that isn’t speckled with truffle oil, dotted with lobster, or some other traitorous intrusion. I for one could not be happier about this transition to higher sophistication in dining options. Who remembers C.F. Chan’s, the Chinese restaurant that served dim sum for a brief period on the corner of College and Biltmore Ave? Back then, Asheville diners couldn’t be trusted to order pork taro buns on a regular basis, so the restaurant gave up and turned to sub-par Chinese, only to shut down altogether.  

But this is 2010. Now, enthused eaters are lining up for pho daily at the Downtown Market’s newest resident, Pho Fusion. What is pho? It’s a giant bowl of hearty, beefy, savory soup, filled to the brim with rice noodles plus a protein of your choice, and served with a pile of Thai basil, cilantro, fresh sprouts and lime wedges. They offer a roast beef version, roasted chicken, delicate eye round, and of course, a tofu option with vegetarian broth.

I’ve tried them all, and I favor the delicate eye round for its rare and tender cuts of meat. Fragrant broth will melt the icicles right off of your eyebrows during the darkest week of the year. In fact, one complaint is the soup is not always hot enough – I think they could crank the temperature up a few notches. You could go for the thickly sliced, roasted chicken or the expertly cooked tofu. I prefer the meat broth to the thinner veggie broth, but that’s an omnivore’s privilege for you. Occasionally I’ll ask for extra veggies, and they’ll throw in some daikon radish and squash to add to the mix.   

Pho Fusion also serves Banh Mi, the popular Vietnamese sandwich. Banh Mi is a product of French colonialism in Indochina, combining ingredients from the French (baguettes, pate and mayonnaise) with native Vietnamese ingredients like cilantro, hot peppers, radish, fish sauce and pickled carrots. Pho Fusion serves the traditional version of the “Saigon Sub” with pate and roast pork. The banh mi sandwich was superb.  

A couple of gripes that must be griped: They snip the noodles into bite-sized pieces before serving them. Oh, but the fun of pho is in the slurping, the twisting and winding of long, finicky rice noodles. While dipping sauce for spring rolls tasted quite flavorful, the rolls themselves were starchy bundles overfilled with rice noodles.  

My advice: take some of those delightful pickled veggies from the sandwiches, and throw them in the spring rolls.  The only other hurdle is that you’ll have to traverse the Yellow Brick Road of the Downtown Market to reach the Emerald City, and that might be too much to ask for some hurried diners.  

The Downtown Market is cold, the lighting is awful, and the bathrooms could use sprucing, but it’s not really about the atmosphere is it? No, at Pho Fusion, it’s about the pho, and that’s exactly the way it should be.