Published:  10:27 Tuesday - March 07, 2017

“Eating it feels more satisfying than knowing the ins and outs of pho.”

In which we learn it's far more satisfying to eat noodles than to think about them.

Way back in 1952, Vu Bang crowned pho Hanoi's “fundamental food” after thinking about the dish and the space it occupied in his beloved city for far longer.

Vietnamese scholars started waxing poetic about pho when it entered the Vietnamese lexicon, about two decades before Bang weighed in. They have continued to do so, ever since.

One of Bang's contemporaries, essayist Nguyen Tuan, described the noodles as a kind of currency, during wartime.

“The homeless dealing at black markets count their commission in bowls of pho,” he wrote. “If a deal turns out right, they'll pocket a hundred bowls of medium-rare pho.”

In his book “Hanoi Delicacies,” Vu Bang noted that some stalls had taken it upon themselves to “improve pho.” Thirty years before his book dropped, Bang had taken a shining to a family on Hang Chieu Street who offered a version of the noodles dressed in sesame oil and tofu. Another shop, on Phu Doan, began adding oil squeezed from the ass of a waterbug.

Bang did not approve of additions of duck, chopped carrot or pickled papaya.

But he did approve of experimentation, in general, which brought Hanoi chicken pho, fried pho and other perversions that survived the test of time.

The only test of a pho's merits that interested Bang was the taste test. In his recollection, it was the only thing that mattered to anyone.

“Words get around: if a pho stall is good, the capital knows within 10 days,” Bang wrote while spying in Saigon. “If the quality dips, customers disappear in just two weeks.”

Bang judged the merits of a given stall by how many bowls he could eat in a single sitting.

His favorites enticed him to order three in a row — even if the bowls contained nothing but noodles and the broth, a Spartan order he called “vegan” (pho chay) despite the flavor it derived from bones.

“On some days you feel like going vegan,” he joked. “A good broth excels without a shred of meat.”