Pho Pasteur

Vietnamese food breaks into the big time

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Pho Pasteur 617) 451-0247 123 Stuart Street (Theater District), Boston Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-10:30 p.m. Major credit cards Full bar No smoking at bar Sidewalk-level access

The pho shop -- a storefront Vietnamese joint with formica, mirrors, and soups of stellar consistency and astonishing cheapness -- is a long-standing secret of Boston food lovers who value flavor and freshness over big-ticket cheffery. The restaurateur Duyen Le began with one tiny shop called Pho Pasteur and has spent the last several years expanding his enterprise, bringing the cuisine out of the pho ghettoes of Chinatown and Dot Ave into New Boston hot spots like Allston, Harvard Square, and Newbury Street. And Boston has responded with enthusiasm: the Harvard Square branch, near my apartment, is consistently full, and I once ate there next to the poet laureate of the United States.

The newest Pho Pasteur, in the Theater District space once occupied by David's, is a whole different kettle of rice chowder. Le has hired a chef with New York training and a rock star's single name (Pichet), fitted out a high-ceilinged room with an elaborate blue-and-salmon evocation of something vaguely French colonial, and launched a full-scale high-end operation. A rump version of the original Pho Pasteur menu is still there, listed as "classics," but the real action is on the other side of the page: a series of lavish fusion dishes that use Asian flavors to perk up serious, distinguished Continental ingredients and sauces.

Did this absolutely need to happen? Maybe not. Vietnamese food is pretty distinguished as it is. But there is room for expansion -- in the use of seasonal ingredients, for instance. The usual pho menu is a year-in, year-out kind of deal, as invariable as the mail. This new place breaks form right away: the current menu is headed "Tastes of an Early Fall." Our tastes were actually pretty wintry. An appetizer of "market vegetables" ($9) involved mostly roots: deep-red beets, Jerusalem artichokes, and mushrooms, all in a dark reduction sauce.

Actually, the restaurant breaks form even before that, when the waiter shows up with a basket of Iggy's rolls -- your pick, plain or sourdough. The old pho-shop standards sit a little strangely with crusty bread, but that just means you might want to skip the bread. Fresh rolls -- here listed as "fresh summer rolls" ($6) -- are translucent rice-paper skins popping with white noodles, tender poached shrimp, and mint leaves. (The first time I had a Vietnamese fresh roll, it ruined the lugubrious, cabbagy egg roll for me forever.) The rolls are basically the same as those served at the smaller Pho Pasteurs, but the presentation is suitably swanky: they're cut on the bias, two of them standing on end like maki at a nice sushi bar, and garnished with elegant stalks of green onion.

The sugar-cane shrimp ($10) were a little more elaborate: three big, butterflied shrimp, curling and smoky with the taste of an open fire, served with a sweet-tart salad of julienned papaya and carrot. The dish was accompanied by a pair of amazing objects that looked a little like corn dogs: sugar-cane skewers topped with a spongy deep-fried shrimp patty. (If you've ever had tod mun at a Thai restaurant, you know what this stuff is.) A bowl of bun ($11) was a meal in itself, consisting of white rice noodles topped with meaty grilled rib-eye steak, basil, and ground peanuts.

The entrées, which range in price from $16 to $23, are more obviously trans-oceanic fusions. We didn't get to try as many as we would have liked: when we ate late on a recent Sunday night, the kitchen had run out of the lobster with coconut-galangal bisque, as well as something called "crispy curried lamb loin `Vermont style,' " which was quite intriguing because, I mean, who eats curried crisped lamb in Vermont? But we did try the pan-roasted Scottish salmon ($17). This was a fillet served on a long, rectangular white plate, the whole thing laid out in artful asymmetry, with vegetables on one end and a sweet tomato-based sauce spreading over the rest of the plate. The salmon was a perfectly tender piece of fish topped with glistening orange salmon eggs; the veggies were a curious assortment of wilted spinach, crunchy lotus root cut into sticks, and a weird earthy-tasting, spongy white vegetable, totally new to me, with a consistency somewhere between that of a morel mushroom and bamboo. Our waiter said it was loofa.

The rich, saucy tradition of upscale European cooking is not an obvious fit with the streamlined freshness of Vietnamese food, so instead of getting muddled in the middle, most dishes here come down more clearly on one side of the line than the other. A scallop appetizer ($10) could pass for New American bistro food; it consisted of several fat Maine scallops, grilled but still delicate inside, sliced into coins and nestled on a starchy bed of mashed potato. The dark, almost boullionish gravy around the outside made it very much a cold-weather dish, lightened only by the spray of sprouts and baby greens on top.

Firmly on the Vietnamese side of the line was the caramel farm-raised catfish, at $13 one of the great bargains of the menu. It came, impressively, in a steaming sand-pot -- a heavy-lidded earthenware casserole that gets very, very hot. I removed the lid with my napkin to find several pieces of catfish fillet in a still-bubbling pool of deep molasses-brown sauce. The sauce was so intense there was only one way to eat it: fish out each bit of fillet with a fork, lay it on the rice in the bowl provided, and then eat the forkful of rice, tender fish, and sweet-hot sauce. It's a great dish -- the hot pot is one of the glories of Vietnamese restaurants, and reminds you of the essential fusion nature of the cuisine: "pho," after all, is pronounced "phuh" because it's derived from the pot-au-feu introduced by French colonists.

For dessert, we had a perfectly satisfying apple tart, or "warm native Alyson apples" ($7), and a striking "Vietnamese coffee semi-freddo" ($6) -- a frozen cone of creamy, sweetened coffee with a crescent of butter cookie arcing over it. The wine list pays appropriate attention to the sweeter whites and spicier reds that go with this food; we drank, by the glass, a Columbia riesling ($7) and an Alsatian pinot gris ($6).

If you're going to be cold-eyed about it, the temptation here is to look at a restaurant like this and think: why eat here when you can get the same bowl of soup for a buck less around the corner? But that's not how I see it. On a deeper level, the idea of a high-end Vietnamese place, part fusion bistro and part pho shop, just clicks: the striking flavors, crisp presentations, and recherché ingredients of Vietnamese food are a natural fit for modern upscale tastes. If you're a fan of the little storefront joints, you probably won't come here except for the occasional barnburner fusion entrée. But not everyone likes formica and mirrors, and for your buttoned-up parents in Newton this may be the beginning of a love affair with a whole new cuisine.

This is Stephen Heuser's last "Dining Out" column for the Phoenix. He can be reached at sfheuser@hotmail.com.

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