SOUTHEAST ASIAN IN SOUTHWEST L.A.

Pho Show brings Vietnamese cuisine to Culver City

The motto of the new Pho Show restaurant in Culver City is “simplicity,” and, sure, the restaurant’s interior is minimalist – plain yellow walls and white furniture with only a display of wine bottles to add color.

Whether the food is as simple depends on what you make of flavors. Vietnamese food, especially pho, the soup featured here, depends on subtle and often complex combinations of spices. Doing it right is anything but simple. The cuisine borrows from the French, who ran the country for most of a hundred years until the 1950s, and the Chinese, who have invaded the place periodically and have a thousand-year trade relationship. Unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, where colonial powers left few culinary traces, the Vietnamese have developed a unique fusion of Asian and European.

Take, for example, our starters – an order of chicken wings fried in Chinese-style pepper salt ($7.50) and the Franco-Vietnamese crepe known as ban xeo ($5.75). Chinese pepper-salt dishes are usually very spicy and oniony and contain as much red pepper as black; the pepper mix here uses black and white pepper with just the merest hint of red. That subtlety is in line with Vietnamese tradition, in which meat and vegetable flavors are modified but never obscured. The six wings were meaty and had a crisp exterior, and were served over a lettuce and scallion salad with a mild herb dressing.

I’d order those again in a flash, but not the ban xeo. This is usually one of my favorite items, a crepe filled with bean sprouts and prawns that is briefly fried in oil, then served with an array of raw vegetables and herbs. When done right, the exterior crackles like a potato chip while the bean sprouts inside are still crisp and almost raw. The ban xeo that arrived at our table had been under-stuffed and over-fried, so the interior was oily. Given the skill shown in the rest of our meal this may have been a momentary lapse; it was the only disappointment of the evening.

We were about to order beer to accompany our starters when I noticed red and white sangria on the list, and when our server confirmed that it was homemade instead of bottled swill, that sealed the deal. The red was okay, the white superlative – fruit and wine together a great match for Vietnamese flavors. I usually pair Vietnamese food with Gewurztraminer or Rieslings; neither are on the wine menu here, but the sangria more than made up for it.

We continued with a charbroiled beef salad ($6). The beef was very mildly spiced instead of the garlicky and peppery version you find at some restaurants, but it worked nicely with the sweet dressing on the lettuce and thin-sliced onion salad. There were fireworks aplenty on our tongues in the next two dishes, a bowl of beef brisket pho ($6.75) and a plate of Singapore noodles with chicken ($8).

The restaurant’s name aside, pho doesn’t rhyme with show – it’s more like “fuh,” from the French pot au feu, “pot on the fire.” It’s a beef broth flavored with star anise, cinnamon, ginger, and other spices, into which rice noodles and various cuts of beef are added. Brisket is most popular with Americans, while Vietnamese often prefer tendon, tripe, and other cuts with more flavor and texture. We chose brisket, which was shaved thin and added to the anise-scented broth. The small bowl was a full main course, and the large bowl that costs only a dollar more would have been a meal in a bowl.

The Singapore noodles were the only non-Vietnamese item of the meal, but the dish that started as street-stall food (mixing fried vermicelli, onion, curry, bell peppers, and meat) has become popular throughout Asia. The spicing is adjustable; I picked spicy, which produced a nicely calibrated heat – not true Thai spicy that burns the roof of your mouth, but a pleasant slow burn that grows a bit with every bite. The portion was ample, and we took some home for breakfast.

Pho Show is one of the few Vietnamese restaurants on the Westside, and after only two months in business the place seems to be doing very well. They’re a valuable addition to a lively neighborhood, and since they’re open until midnight on weekends I now have a place to go when I cannot resist that late-night craving for a bowl of pho.

Pho Show is at 4349 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver City. Open 12-3 p.m. and 5-midnight every day. Beer and wine served, street parking only. (310) 398-5200.