This article is about the Vietnamese soup dish. Phở is a popular food in Vietnam where it is served in households, street stalls and restaurants countrywide. Phở originated senate bean soup instant pot the early 20th century in Northern Vietnam, and was popularized throughout the world by refugees after the Vietnam War.

Phở likely evolved from similar noodle dishes. Xuân commune, Nam Trực District, Nam Định Province. Cultural historian and researcher Trịnh Quang Dũng believes that the popularization and origins of modern pho stemmed from the intersection of several historical and cultural factors in the early 20th century. From the pole hung two wooden cabinets, one housing a cauldron over a wood fire, the other storing noodles, spices, cookware, and space to prepare a bowl of phở.

Hanoi’s first two fixed phở stands were a Vietnamese-owned Cát Tường on Cầu Gỗ Street and a Chinese-owned stand in front of Bờ Hồ tram stop. They were joined in 1918 by two more on Quạt Row and Đồng Row. Around 1925, a Vân Cù villager named Vạn opened the first “Nam Định style” pho stand in Hanoi. 1946 in favor of stationary eateries. Chicken pho appeared in 1939, possibly because beef was not sold at the markets on Mondays and Fridays at the time. With the partition of Vietnam in 1954, over a million people fled North Vietnam for South Vietnam. Phở, previously unpopular in the South, suddenly became popular.

Street vendors were forced to use noodles made of imported potato flour. Pho eateries were privatized as part of Đổi Mới. Many street vendors must still maintain a light footprint to evade police enforcing the street tidiness rules that replaced the ban on private ownership. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese refugees brought pho to many countries. Restaurants specializing in phở appeared in numerous Asian enclaves and Little Saigons, such as in Paris and in major cities in the United States, Canada and Australia. In the United States, phở began to enter the mainstream during the 1990s, as relations between the U.

The word “pho” was added to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2007. Phở is listed at number 28 on “World’s 50 most delicious foods” compiled by CNN Go in 2011. Reviews of 19th and 20th century Vietnamese literature have found that pho entered the mainstream sometime in the 1910s. Georges Dumoutier’s extensive 1907 account of Vietnamese cuisine omits any mention of phở, while Nguyễn Công Hoan recalls its sale by street vendors in 1913.

A dish consisting of small slices of rice cake boiled with beef. As author Nguyễn Dư notes, both questions are significant to Vietnamese identity. French settlers commonly ate beef, whereas Vietnamese traditionally ate pork and chicken and used cattle as beasts of burden. However, several scholars dispute this etymology on the basis of the stark differences between the two dishes. Peters argues that the French have embraced phở in a way that overlooks its origins as a local improvisation, reinforcing “an idea that the French brought modern ingenuity to a traditionalist Vietnam”.

Vietnamese dish common in Hanoi at the turn of the century. Originally eaten by commoners near the Red River, it consisted of stir-fried strips of water buffalo meat served in broth atop rice vermicelli. Eventually the street cry became “Meat and noodles! This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.