Pho Lien

Pho Lien
5703 Côte des Neiges
Montreal, QC
●●●●●●●●☺○○
8 1/2 out of 10

All I've had here is the pho and the cold vermicelli rolls. Sure, they have other things at this restaurant, but you just don't order those. They are nothing special by comparison.

This is the best beef broth I've found in the city, and until I find better (since I'm not convinced it is the best ever) I will come back here when I am craving a rich, sweet broth of star anise, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon and not in the mood for half a day's worth of broth-making.

I came here once and was absolutely blown away by the broth, but I came here again for lunch and was completely disappointed. For once I couldn't complain that the broth was too salty and tasted like MSG, but where once there had been cloves, now there were none. I feel like I spend my life in Vietnamese restaurants asking, "Where are the cloves? I don't taste cloves!" Cloves are a hard-to-miss flavour. They're what make a pumpkin pie taste like Thanksgiving. Sure, there's mace, a strong, bitter spice from nutmeg, but for me, it's all about cloves. Then star anise - that's the fennel flavour. It shouldn't make the broth taste like black licorice, but it should be present. The cinnamon shouldn't be overpowering either, but it should complement the cloves. The broth just was more lacklustre this time. Nothing really stood out about it. So maybe the lunch broth was made differently or by a different chef than the evening broth. Or maybe it had needed to simmer longer but the chefs (the kitchen help that started the broth) didn't arrive until later that morning. Maybe it was an off-lunch. Still, it was not what I wanted, and if I'm going to eat beef, it had better be good.
I'll get the boring things out of the way. The imperial rolls were fine. The crust seemed pretty crispy. If you like such things, these are a decent rendition. The dipping sauce is simple.
The cold vermicelli spring rolls ($3.00 for 2, tax inc.) were pretty good just because the peanut dipping sauce is incredible. I'm too scared to ask what's in it, bad food reviewer that I am, because I know there'll be something in it that I won't want to eat, like MSG-laden bottled sauces or ingredients I can't pronounce, or ingredients that start with the word "condensed", all of which are bad. The sauce here is served slightly warm and topped with tasty, fresh peanuts and somehow tastes a bit like the richness of beef. Do they put broth in the dip? Probably not. Probably I'm crazy, but I'm certainly not going to ask. One unique thing they do is put beef in the actual roll. Yes, you can see shrimp in the picture above, but there is also cooked, finely sliced beef, like what goes in the soup. It has a lot of flavour, and as long as you aren't really upset to discover beef in the roll, you'll like it. It's the first Vietnamese restaurant I've seen that does beef in the rolls. It really does add flavour.
The Chicken Pho Ga. Now this was interesting. The chicken was shredded from a full bird that had been boiled to make the broth. Thus the broth was mild and clear. It's a good broth. Some people prefer the chicken broth to be seasoned with the same spices as the beef broth, but chicken is a milder flavour and I don't think it holds up to the strong spices as well. It gets kind of overwhelmed. Doesn't know how to react. Would you if you were swimming in cloves? Have a little compassion for the chicken broth.

If you're looking for a very simple chicken broth to cure what ails you, this is it. Thick globules of delicious fat swim in the broth and raw onions garnish. Throw in some bean sprouts, basil and then bite into a lime and it's very satisfactory.
I don't look for "satisfactory" in a restaurant, however. I look for epiphany, perfection, and I expect the best. Otherwise it's a waste of my money and I should make a better version at home. I have incredible lamb broth in my freezer. I can make my own broth, but it's not pho, real pho. We are all capable of making delicious soup broth, but every cook's broth is slightly different and so every restaurant is a slightly different experience, whether or not it's better or worse. This beef broth at Pho Lien is real pho, but only when done correctly. It's much better than Pho Bac #1 in Verdun. It's better than Chinatown.

This is probably the only restaurant I will recommend getting take-out. Now you wouldn't think you'd want to order raw beef soup and carry it home to eat. The heat promotes the growth and spread of bacteria, so ideally you'd want to eat at the restaurant to not give those guys a chance at procreation. I always say there are too many children in the world anyway.

But here, you want to take the soup to go. It gets packed in two separate Styrofoam (I know, awful for the environment, but the only way to travel with hot soup) containers, with the beef left uncooked in one along with the noodles and bean sprouts, and the soup in another. So when you get home you heat up the broth and add only the amount of noodles to it that you're going to eat in the next 5 minutes. Then you put half the raw beef in a bowl (not the pot) and scoop out a ladle of broth and noodles. Add some bean sprouts and basil and have your lime at the ready. This way the beef is barely cooked when you eat it. Raw beef is tender when it's good quality. If you wait at the restaurant to be served (even though service is fast) your raw beef will not be raw when it arrives. ALSO by the time you get halfway through your soup the rest of the "raw" beef has become very "well-done". So if you're at home, you can only eat as much beef as you want at a time. You eat some, and then when you want more you put more in your bowl (keep it in the fridge while you eat the first bowl) and then ladle more of your heated broth from the pot into your bowl. The reason you don't want to add the noodles all at once is they get too soft when they're left sitting in the broth, and if you refrigerate leftovers they'll be mush when you heat them up the next day. So heat up a portion in the broth, then get them all into your bowl, and leave some of the broth sitting on the stove in case you want more beef in 5 minutes. At that point you can just add more noodles to the broth. This re-heating process takes no time at all. Just don't boil off too much broth. The flavour will concentrate more this way, but you'll end up with less broth overall. So it's a trade-off. You're also supposed to trust that the chef got the broth to the perfect concentration in HIS kitchen, and you're not really supposed to mess with that.

At the restaurant you can order all raw beef ($7 for a small, $8 for a large, $9 for two days worth of food, aka XL, all tax included), but that's ridiculous because you won't possibly be able to eat it all while it's raw. By the time you make it through the bowl of beef, only your first few mouthfuls would be raw and then the next would be medium, and then the next would be well-done. So order a combination bowl to make it worth it. You can also order the "cow in a bowl" (my words, not theirs) - tripe, tendon, rare, brisket, and well-done flank ($.25 more than the other soups). I love that nothing is wasted, but tripe and tendon are acquired tastes. The tendon has the texture of fat and much less flavour. I couldn't find a piece of brisket, but the effect of the tender meat is lost in soup where it all falls apart anyway.

Another reason to take out is because they give you a little container of hoisin mixed with hot sauce, two things I generally don't use in my pho, but do use in my other cooking. You also get to keep any leftover peanut sauce from the cold spring rolls, which is worth it in and of itself. You can keep your garnishes, say, if you don't want all the bean sprouts at the time. You actually waste less of what's put in front of you at a meal of pho by getting take-out, minus the Styrofoam and plastic containers and plastic bag. Oh, and of course you save a little money. The environment is screwed either way, so it's your choice.

So in my opinion there may be somewhere better for pho in Montreal, but I don't know where that is yet. Yet.

Expect To Pay: $12.50-$14.00 for soup and an order of cold spring rolls.

Hours: Mon, Wed-Fri 11am-10pm, Sat-Sun 10am-10pm
514-735-6949