Phở #1 Earns Its Name

This week, writer Julie Peterman offers a love letter to Phở #1, the Albuquerque restaurant that has been a go-to for her on days of homesickness and despair. Whether it’s a steaming bowl of phở or green chile enchiladas, we should all be so lucky to have instant comfort on speed dial.

The last meal I eat before leaving Albuquerque for good is at Phở #1. We’re in the tortuous heat of July in the desert. For days, the temperature has been encroaching on the low hundreds while I’ve hauled poorly packed boxes and impossibly heavy furniture into a metal trailer sitting in front of my apartment in the blazing sun.

In other words, it is not the time for hot soup. Worse, I imagine, for some readers, my fiancé is vegetarian—so we’re skipping the meat today. While Phở #1 specializes in traditional Vietnamese cuisine, including bò 7 món (seven courses of beef) and phở bò (beef noodle soup)—both of which are stellar—I find myself, even as a meat eater, going back again and again to their vegetarian options, just as satisfying as the rest of their offerings.

It may not be the traditional New Mexican comfort meal, but it is my comfort meal. It’s the place I will miss the most, and by the time I leave, I’m convinced there is nowhere that will feel quite so Albuquerque as Phở #1.

When I moved to Albuquerque three years ago, I knew nearly nothing about the city, except a little about the food. There was a New Mexican restaurant I frequented on the West Coast, where I learned how to answer “Red or green?,” where I’d fallen in love with sopapillas and smothered burritos. Every year, a mysterious man—I don’t think he had a business, per se—would drive the twenty or so hours up from New Mexico with bushels of green chile in his hatchback and a roaster attached to the hitch. He’d roast them right there in the restaurant parking lot, red-hot coals spitting black charcoaled flakes up into the air.

So it wasn’t Vietnamese soup I imagined eating most when I moved to the Southwest. In my first year of teaching in New Mexico, I had my students write a review of their favorite place in the world. One wrote about a small Vietnamese restaurant on San Pedro that her family had been going to since she was a child, and I thought I’d stop by to try it.

Over the years, Phở #1 became the place I went whenever I needed a balm for the harsh grief of uprooting my whole life. I rarely brought my best self there. I showed up in Crocs and joggers, hair a mess, tear stains still on my cheeks. I often called in to-go orders when the pantry had run dry and I was ravenous, having forgotten to eat until 3 in the afternoon, a headache already splitting across my skull. And always, Lilly, who owns and runs Phở #1 alongside her husband, would pick up. “Ten minutes,” she would promise, hanging up quickly. And ten minutes later, without fail, an extra-large, carefully wrapped Styrofoam container full of consistently delicious phở was sitting beside me in the passenger seat.

Now my fiancé drives us down Lomas and then San Pedro, our car packed with laundry baskets and already-wilting plants for the long drive tomorrow. The heat weighs heavy over everything, brown exhaust billowing behind cars in hot clouds. Phở #1 sits in the middle of a nondescript strip mall, wedged between the Mexican restaurant Cielito Lindo, a tax preparation business, and a massage parlor. Marking its location is a thatched roof facade with a faded display: Phở #1, Vietnamese Food. The curtains are drawn, the windows dark.

When we walk in on this blisteringly hot day at 5 p.m., there are, unsurprisingly, no other diners. We say hello to Lilly. There isn’t a day I’ve dined here when she or someone in her family was not working. She recognizes us now and there’s a bittersweetness to leaving a place where we’ve become regulars.

I start with the avocado shake. It’s perfect—creamy and sweet, earthy the way a ripe avocado should be. Next is a Vietnamese iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk. Yes, it’s 5 p.m. and I won’t be able to sleep after getting wired on the caffeine, but it’s such a delicious reprieve from the heat outside, I drink the whole thing, and it’s a treat, like dessert before the meal.

We have the tofu spring rolls as an appetizer. They’re simple and lovely: fresh, crunchy veggies wrapped tightly in rice paper. The peanut sauce is thick and creamy, nutty with just the right hints of salt, sweet, and spice.

The vegetarian noodle soup comes, and it’s the real star of the show. It may not seem like the most exciting thing on the menu—hidden several pages in at item #134—but it is secretly one of the best vegetarian meals in Albuquerque. The broth is salty and savory, brimming with the perfect balance of mushroomy umami and bright, biting onions and ginger. The aromatics traditional to phở, like star anise and clove and coriander, bring complexity to the broth. The soup is loaded with baby corn, thick slices of carrot, sugar snap peas, and broccoli, and sprinkled with crispy fried shallots (which I will admit I sometimes pluck off the top with my chopsticks and eat on their own). And it’s paired with the usual accoutrements—jalapeños, Thai basil, and bean sprouts. I like to let the generous portion of tofu, thickly sliced and deep-fried, soak up the flavor of the broth. So I wait to eat, picking the bite-size pieces of basil off its stems and spooning chile oil from its small plastic dish, watching it swirl in deep, spicy reds. There is comfort in this act, in the ritual of dressing the food before we tuck in. I’m sweating, the swamp cooler working overtime, and it’s the perfect meal, just like I knew it would be.

Phở #1 opened in October 2004 and quietly reached their twentieth anniversary last year with no fanfare. I bundled myself up in the dark to have dinner there at least once a week during the colder months, so it’s entirely possible I was sitting at a table on the exact day of their twentieth anniversary. But I wouldn’t have known. None of us in the room, hunched over our extra-large bowls, slurping from our soup spoons, the TV mutely playing a football game above us, would have known. That is exactly what I love so much about Phở #1.

In my early twenties, I worked in fine dining. I fell in love with the sexiness of it all—white-hot flames and angry chefs and toxic perfectionism. It was all very The Bear. And sure, there’s something about those meals. But if food is love, Phở #1 is the one you marry. It’s not loud or sexy. It doesn’t boast or gloat. It’s the place you go when you need a long, warm hug. It’s reliable and consistent: tasty, solid, affordable, and fast every time. It may not be what you were planning to eat in New Mexico, but aren’t the best love stories the ones you don’t see coming?

Phở #1

414 San Pedro SE

Albuquerque, NM

505-268-0488