There are no great Vietnamese restaurants in Gotham, so we have to settle for places that are merely good. One of those is Tu Do ("Freedom"), formerly known as Pho Tu Do. Until recently, it was located across the street from its present location on the west side of Bowery, south of Grand Street. The new restaurant occupies a larger space, with two long rows of tables on either side of a low wall, and so many kinds of bright and distracting lighting, you may want to wear a blindfold as you eat. But, in a slap in the face to modernity, the décor also fakes a village, with rustic overhangs and hut-like decorations. Get over the annoying ambience, though, because the food is often worth it.
While northern California's Bay Area glories in its tiny pho shops, which do only one thing and do it exceedingly well, our restaurants tend to dabble in pho, mounting random menus hundreds of items long, featuring Chinese as well as Vietnamese recipes. Sure, our joints throw the same inscrutable combo of beef cuts into the soup—flank steak, tendon, omosa (tripe), fatty brisket, navel (lean brisket), and eye of round (thin-sliced raw steak)—but Bay Area cafés offer broths that totally blow ours away.
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