Bún Chả, the Hanoi Way, at Pho Hathanh

Lunch was bún chả Hà Nội at Pho Hathanh, a Vietnamese restaurant in Portland, Oregon, and it's now the best version of one of my favorite Asian dishes that I've had around here. The place is tucked into the ground floor of an old converted craftsman house, easy to drive past if you don't already know it's there.

Finding the sign

The restaurant announces itself twice before you're even through the door — a hanging sign out on the porch post, and a second, backlit version mounted on a wall of stacked reclaimed wood just inside the entry. Both carry the same crest: a laurel wreath around a script "P."

What the dining room feels like

Inside, it doesn't read like a converted house for long — deep red walls, a mural of terraced rice paddies, and a bar lit with a row of hanging Edison bulbs strung through fairy lights. A smaller room off to the side goes the other direction, mustard-yellow walls with a photograph of a boy asleep across the back of a water buffalo, which does more to set the mood than anything on the menu could.

The bún chả itself

Bún chả Hà Nội — pictured above — is grilled pork, both fatty belly slices and small hand-formed meatballs, served warm in a shallow bowl of sweet-savory broth with a few pieces of pickled carrot and daikon floating in it, alongside a plate of plain rice vermicelli and a full plate of fresh herbs to tear in yourself. The idea is to build your own bite: noodles and herbs dropped into the broth with the pork, not eaten separately. The vermicelli mixed in with the broth here was genuinely great — the noodles pick up just enough of the broth without turning to mush, which is the part a lot of versions of this dish get wrong.

The plate at the next table

I also took a photo of another plate, from my neighbor's table — I never got the name of it, but I couldn't resist: fried tofu, cold cuts, wood ear and other mushrooms, a rice noodle cake, cucumber, and the same fresh herbs, all built around a small bowl of a dark, savory dipping sauce topped with fried shallots. The lineup — fried tofu, cold cuts, a noodle cake, herbs, and a pungent dark dip — has the shape of bún đậu mắm tôm, a well-known Hanoi street-food plate built around fermented shrimp paste, though I'm going on the ingredients here rather than anything printed on the menu, so take the name as an educated guess rather than a confirmed one.

Long, Hoa, and the egg rolls

Pho Hathanh is run by a husband-and-wife team, Long and his wife Hoa — a name that means "flower" in Vietnamese. Long does the front of house and clearly knows his ingredients cold; Hoa is the cook, and it shows in everything that came out of the kitchen. Long told me their egg rolls are wrapped in a special rice paper imported from Vietnam — thinner than what most places around here use, and made to be fried only once. Both of them cook in the style of their hometown, Hanoi, which is the throughline of the whole menu.

A special rice paper, imported from Vietnam — thin, and only meant to be fried once. That's what Long told me about the egg rolls.

A few things worth knowing about food from Hanoi

Northern Vietnamese cooking — Hanoi's style specifically — tends to run lighter-handed than what most Americans think of as "Vietnamese food," which is usually closer to the Saigon style: fewer herbs piled on top, a clearer broth, and a more restrained hand with sugar. A few specific threads worth knowing:

• Bún chả went internationally famous in 2016, when Anthony Bourdain took President Obama to a bún chả spot in Hanoi for an episode of Parts Unknown — the table, and the $6 tab, became briefly world-famous.
• Phở itself traces back to Hanoi in the early 20th century, and northern-style phở still tends to be served plainer than the southern version — fewer bean sprouts and fresh herbs on the side, more black pepper and a clearer broth.
• Egg coffee — cà phê trứng — is a Hanoi invention, dating to the 1940s, made by whipping egg yolk with condensed milk into a custard-like foam over strong drip coffee. If you see it on a Hanoi-style menu, it's worth a try — I wrote up a glass of it at Trung Nguyên Legend earlier this summer.