Whilst on a recent business trip to Melbourne, one of my lovely colleagues didn’t want to see me eating on my own and suggested we go out for lunch. Typically I am not very adventurous, normally whatever I get comes with chips.
So it had reached midday and we were ready to go.
He asked “What do you like eating?”
I replied “I really don’t care, I eat anything”.
He says “How about Pho”.
I hear “How about Fo”.
I reply “Sounds good”.
I think “What the hell is Fo?”
So we get in his car and off we go, the Pho restaturant we went to was closed and boarded up. So off we go to another Pho restaurant. Hang on a second, I’d never heard of the stuff and now I find out there are more than one restaurant specialising in the stuff within walking distance of each other.
In we walk and sit down, a menu is placed in front of us along with a drinks menu. Let’s start with the easy stuff and work backwards. “I’ll have a beer please”. Nice! I really sound like I belong here, no one is looking at me thinking ‘he hasn’t got a fucking clue’.
Now to the food. My friend is obviously quite the expert and finds his selection in no time at all, he closes the menu and waits for me. I think I flicked back and forth about 20 times thinking, ‘surely they must serve burger and chips here?’.
In the end I settle on a chicken dish, there was no picture to go along with the selection like some of the other choices, but this is chicken. I know chicken. I love chicken. I eat it all the time. What could possibly go wrong?
Then the horror unfolds. The waiter eventually returns and places our meals in front of us. My friend was a work friend, not the type of friend I could get eating tips from, especially after I declared Pho sounded good. Now it turns out my friends meal is basically a soup.
Let me interject here and mention what Pho actually is:
‘pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup consisting of broth, rice noodles called bánh phở, a few herbs, and meat, primarily made with either beef or chicken.’
So if I thought to Google it, it wouldn’t come as a surprise it was a soup. But his seemed to be a basic soup, no extra bells and whistles, the type of soup I would be capable of eating without looking like his slow rertarded brother.
As you can tell from where I am going here, mine was a bit different.
I received a bowl of soup, full of noodles and on a side plate I received 3 pieces of chicken including chicken drumsticks. I was given chopsticks and a spoon as my weapon selection. I looked down in horror, looked up and him and smiled and looked down again and thought ‘where the fuck do I start’.
Now given I had never heard of Pho before you are correct in assuming I haven’t ever used chopsticks before. I had no idea how to hold them or what part of my meal they were intended for. So they were pushed aside leaving me with only a spoon. Have you ever tried eating noodles with a spoon? It ain’t easy.
What am I supposed to do with the chicken? Do I chuck it in the soup? Or is that a side dish? I can’t put a drumstick in the soup due to the bone and if I did how on earth am I supposed to retrieve it afterwards with my spoon.
The spoon seems good for one thing only, the soup (which if I was brutally honest looked like dish water), but hey when in Rome…..awkwardly eat Pho. I took a couple of spoonfuls of liquid and then thought I need to try and get some noodles. I tried to balance some on the spoon but on the journey from the bowl to my mouth the noodles decided they like the dishwater better and plunged back in. This, as most dive bombs do caused a nice big splash over my shirt. Ok, I’ll come back around to the noodles in a bit.
The chicken……fuck it……I just grabbed it with my hands and ate it off the bone like the classless Westerner I am. It was delicious, laced with good amounts of my ignorance.
I went back to the noodles, I think my mistake was thinking the main part of the dish was the noodles and my job was to rescue them from the murky depths of the brown liquid. Instead I should have realised the soup was the integral part of this dish.
So the end result was that I ate all the chicken with my hands, I drank the soup via the spoon just enough so that I could drive the noodles ashore meaning there would be no spillages. Then ate what little noodles I could with the spoon before declaring I was full up and this was delicious. Meanwhile planning to visit my other friend Ronald McDonald as soon as I could and apologise for playing the field. I will never do it again, please take me back.
Ha ha ha ha ha. ! Just off across the road to get McDonald’s for dinner . looking forward to the next one.
Oh to have been a fly on the wall…too funny!! 😂
Gold!!! 😂😂😂😂