Pho Cue, 52a Faulkner Street, Manchester M1 4FH (0161 237 5664). Small dishes £5-£6.50, larger dishes £8-£11.80, wines from £17.50, Vietnamese beers £4
The train has just heaved itself out of London Euston, when the phone’s ping announces its toddler-like demand for attention. There’s a voicemail. I listen, and feel my heart take the express lift down 20 floors to my needy stomach. The restaurant I had booked for lunch in Manchester, the one this train is now transporting me towards, has been told by NHS Test and Trace that it must close temporarily. Therefore, with regret, my lunchtime booking is cancelled. And so on. Seriously? That booking, the one that’s just been cancelled, was a replacement for the previous one in Manchester that had also been cancelled. I awoke a few days before to a text baldly announcing the fact and telling me to check my email. It turned out they, too, had Test and Trace issues that had forced them, for staffing reasons, to close at lunchtimes.
For the sake of doubt my main sympathies here are with the restaurants. It’s your classic, Scream-by-Munch-with-a-side-dish-of-blood-drenched-Carrie nightmare. God, just surviving the lockdowns of the past 18 months has been hard enough. But to reopen only to be forced to close again is a bespoke kind of cruel. Some will argue there is a simple moral to this story: I shouldn’t be travelling to restaurants to review them. On this, I don’t think I can win. Others complain I haven’t left London recently. My view is that restaurants are open, that I am double jabbed, and that I should simply get on with it.
Of course, that’s easier said than done, when the restaurants keep cancelling. So let me say that my subsidiary sympathies are with myself. Poor me. As my train barrels through Milton Keynes, I fire off messages to my friends in Manchester, seeking recommendations for somewhere for lunch that is a) noteworthy and b) open and able to take a table for two at roughly 90 minutes’ notice.
Which is how I find myself on the familiar walk from Manchester Piccadilly station to the tight knot of streets that makes up the city’s Chinatown. There, just 100m or so down Faulkner Street from the bold flourish of the Chinatown Arch, is Pho Cue. It’s a simple cafeteria space with fake whitewashed brick walls and a fake vertical garden, the restaurant’s name glaring out in white neon from amid the plastic flowers. Say that name out loud. Say it quickly. If you fancy, make a stab at pronouncing “pho” correctly so it sounds closer to “fur”. I can wait. Yeah, I know. Now let’s move on.
The owner, Cue Tran, can of course say he was merely putting his first name above the door, but he’s savvier than that. He knows how to work the angles. “I know it tastes good,” he said of their food, in an interview last year with the website Manchester Confidential, when they had just opened. “It tastes like home. It’s not just my name above the restaurant, but the legacy of my family. As long as the methods are there then you bring it up to date and make it look Instagram-worthy.” Pho Cue may indeed be a bright modern presence on Instagram, but it hums with history. Cue’s family escaped Vietnam during the war in a dinghy, joining the other boat people in their search of safety. He was just a baby at the time. Now here is that family making a statement about who they are and where they have come from, one brisk, vibrant dish at a time. In the kitchen Tran is often accompanied by his father and uncle.
All the classics are present and correct and all are seriously good value. Small dishes are around £6. Very few of the larger dishes make it into double figures. We see summer rolls, sliced in half and standing to attention in their silky white skins, pass us by. There are deep-fried spring rolls. Both come with pungent dipping sauces. There are, of course, banh mi, those huge lengths of over-stuffed, slightly sweet baguette, a legacy of the former French colonial power now transferred to Manchester.
We have soft-shell crab, broken up and lightly battered, in a big, dry mess of onions, garlic, chilli, salt and pepper with just a touch of sugar. It’s a bowl of pow and gosh and “do you mind if I finish this?” The nearest thing to slightly arch innovation is what they call Vietnamese tacos, the wheat or corn flour tortilla replaced by hand-sized deep-fried pancakes, lined with iceberg lettuce then filled with a sweet-sour tumble of fresh tomatoes, bean sprouts, fried shallots and in our case roasted pork. It’s a messy, encouraging handful. Ask for extra napkins.
The pho is everything it should be: a huge bowl, steaming with the sort of 24-hour simmered stock that helps you conclude everything is right with the world. Its rich savoury depths are profound and restorative and all consuming. Ours has thin slices of beef, poached from raw in the liquor, along with handfuls of fresh mint, coriander, spring onions and beansprouts. At the bottom is a big old tangle of slippery rice noodles. It is a dish to which you could return time and again. It is lunch by itself and, at £9.30, a damn reasonable one.
We have a plate of their crispy pork belly, with crackling like glass and the softest of fat, under a snowfall of sliced spring onions and more golden fried shallots. There is a sweet and vinegary, crisp and crunchy salad of papaya and king prawns and carrots and peanuts. Like so much here, it simply makes you feel like you are being good to yourself. I ask if there is a dessert menu, more out of professional duty than desire. I am told that there is not, so we return to where we began and order a second plate of the soft-shell crab, just to check it really was as good as we thought the first-time round. You’ll be relieved to know it was. Eventually, we down the chopsticks and chase the last fragments around the bowl with a spoon.
The widely distanced tables are filled with mostly Asian families this lunchtime all having a very good time. I am no less sympathetic to the two Manchester restaurants where I wasn’t able to eat today. I want them to get back to being fully open as soon as possible. I still want to eat at both of them. But I can’t pretend: I am grateful that happenstance has delivered me here, into Cue Tran’s vivacious tribute to where he started and who he is.
News bites
A new subscription-based service offering online tuition from chefs including Nathan Outlaw and Matt Healy has just launched. My Chef Skills currently offers around 80 different classes covering seafood cookery (from Outlaw), Indian home cooking, Thai food, gastro pub classics and savoury baking. A subscription costs £12.50 a month, paid quarterly, visit mychefskills.com.
The Exploding Bakery in Exeter has launched a short season of chef take-overs. There are two more remaining. On 20 August, South Devon-based chefs Jane Baxter and Sam Miller of Wild Artichoke will serve a four-course Puglian menu. Then in September, Clare Lattin and Tom Hill of Ducksoup in London’s Soho will serve a Gascony-inspired harvest lunch, under the trees of an orchard owned by cider company Find & Foster. See explodingbakery.com.
I mention the launch of the international members’ club Chef du Jour with a decidedly raised eyebrow. It’s a club for people who just adore mystery 10-course tasting menus. You pay a joining fee of £590 and then get the privilege of paying another £180 a head for a seat for each dinner, cooked by a different chef each month. But the names of the chefs are a secret, until they’ve started cooking. As, of course, is the menu. Apparently, the first opens in Paris at the end of August followed by Miami and then London. Form an orderly queue at club-chefdujour.com.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
