pho-king

Com Pho in Tokyo

Reader Michael Toppa recently ate at Com Pho in Tokyo, which serves a "highly bastardized" pho - not bad, but not strictly pho.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a pho review. I have a backlog of a few I’ve been meaning to write (two more in Philly and one in San Mateo), and hopefully I’ll get to those soon. But for now I’ll weave my talk of pho with my ongoing talk of Tokyo. Pho is not easy to find in Japan. While the Vietnamese diaspora in Tokyo is big enough to sustain at least a few Vietnamese restaurants, you usually need to go to a specialty shop to get good pho. Thanks to the dazzling pho-king site, I was aware of at least one pho restaurant in Tokyo. Unfortunately, I never made it there - it would have been an excursion to get there from where we lived, and it just never made it to the top of the list. But I did stumble across the Com Pho stand in the  basement of the Marunouchi Oazo shopping center, located across the street from Tokyo station. Com Pho is a chain with four locations in Tokyo, but I haven’t been to the others.

Read the full review (with pictures) on Michael's site.

Tokyo Pho

Our friend and regular reader Kazamatsuri lives in Japan and notes that there is at least one excellent source of high-quality pho in Tokyo. He also includes an image taken with his cameraphone.

...The place I went to was called "Chopsticks." It's a little dive in an area called Kouenji in Tokyo, about 1 minutes walk from the station. Nearly impossible to find. My friend and I walked back and forth around the same area for about 15 minutes before we finally found the joint.

They pride themselves on their homemade noodles and their all-natural seasonings. A friend of mine who went with used to live in Vietnam and she said this was the closest thing to homemade pho she's ever eaten in a restaurant. I'll definitely be going back, even though it's kind of far from where I live.

Here's proof of good pho in Japan, which is harder to find than you'd think.