Review: Pho New Bay

But what you come for is pho, the enigmatic century-old Vietnamese national soup often served for breakfast. Pho is heavy with Chinese influences with roots sunk subtly in French consommés, recalling a time when French colonial culture all but dominated this sliver of a country with a mountainous strand that runs through the middle like a scaled spine.

The pho unspools in a dozen or so variations: rare steak, well-done flank and tripe (stomach lining from cattle), rare steak and tendon, brisket, chicken, rice noodles without any meats, along with other mixed and matched variants.

Beef balls are spongy spheres, sometimes halved, with air pockets locked in the fiber. They float amongst the rice noodle strands that sometimes knot but are mostly separate, slithering over one another's lengths. There is the requisite plate of bean sprouts, basil and angry seeded jalapeño slices—all not at their freshest—to stir into the froth. There are crudely cleaved pieces of lime to be squeezed in to embolden the flavors further. The broth exhales a heady steam perfumed with star anise that seduces like stroking fingertips. Despite the strength of the aromas, the broth is surprisingly tame, allowing the flavors of the freshly blanched greens to say their piece in relative quiet.

Overcooked flaccid rice noodles begin to knot into a gluey tumor in the special combo of steak, well-done flank, tendon and tripe. The tripe is like a plasticized honeycomb. It snaps and crunches. The steak is chewy, its richness boiled away.

Orange-rimmed slices of dry pork roil with shrimp overcooked into twine fibers in the shrimp and pork rice noodle soup, a rare beefless pho. Yet the noodles are perfectly cooked. This pho can be as inconsistent as the salted prawns.

It's near impossible to put a dent in a regular-sized bowl of Pho New Bay pho. The server brings plastic containers and fills them at your table, spilling broth that pools in an expanding puddle that saturates everything in its pho floodplain. On the high-def, Discovery is running Storm Chasers, a show in which meteorological daredevils hunt twisters in tornado alley. They find two during a cloud chase from Amarillo to Kansas. They do this in a bizarre thing called a Tornado Intercept Vehicle. The TIV has bullet-proof windows, an observation turret and wide fender flares. It looks like an up-armored rug shampooer. Pre-tornado rains hit. The meteorologists hunker down. The TIV's wipers sway over its bullet-proof windows. Our server mops up pho with paper napkins. It'll take a big storm to right this menu.

17479 Preston Road, 972-447-0103.Open 9:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday-Thursday,9:30 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday & Saturday. $-$$