My Tho

My Tho’s menu is entirely noodle soups with one variation: Crawfish. This seemed strange to me, especially for such a big restaurant. But that’s fine because the crawfish was freaking awesome. The 2 of us ordered the last pound in the kitchen for $ 10. We were instructed to simply peel back the top shell and chomp on the insides, then get at the tail. The grainy house sauce had this awesome mix of flavors — it had this spicy, garlicky fervor to it. You can really identify the gulf influence on Vietnamese cooking here. I asked the owner, who’s family owns a slew of other My Tho’s in Texas, what it’s like where his family is. He said Philadelphia was nothing. Where he’s from in Texas, there’s ten times as much Vietnamese. Wow — this is the first time since my just-​post-​college-​Austin-​idealist days I’ve wanted to go to Texas. The soup was great too. This Vietnamese was enlightening.
My fingers smelled wonderful for hours.

Tiny little place in the Wing Phat shopping center, hidden next to Phở 75 but hard to spot because it’s inside that shady cig stench hallway.
The menu is confusing but is in both Vietnamese & English. I recommend any of the noodle dishes, the chewy clear noodles being better than the egg noodles. Get it with the broth on the side, there’s tons of flavors in the «dry» noodles that you can dunk in the side of broth. I think that the pricing is on par with cheapo phở, but My Tho definitely skimps on the meat here — only 2 shrimp and a few slices of pork? Come on now!
Regardless, the noodles are still my favorite part of phở or mi, and this is a nice change from the usual. Oh, and they have crawfish after 2 pm if that is your thing!