Why Pho Is a Breakfast Food in Vietnam

In Hanoi the pho shops open around six and are busiest by seven. By eleven many of them have sold out and shut for the day. If you turn up at eight in the evening looking for a bowl, the good places will already be closed and the ones still open are serving tourists.

This surprises people who have only met pho as a dinner, which is how it exists almost everywhere outside Vietnam. In Vietnam it is breakfast, and the reasons are practical rather than ceremonial.

The broth decides the schedule

Pho broth takes most of a night. Bones, ginger and onion charred over a flame, star anise, cinnamon, black cardamom, coriander seed and clove, then hours of the gentlest possible simmer while the cook skims it to keep it clear.

A pot started in the late evening is ready at dawn. It is at its best in the first few hours and it does not improve by sitting, so the commercial logic is simple: open early, sell through the morning, close when the pot is finished. A shop that is still serving pho at nine at night is serving you something that has been sitting since six in the morning, or something that was never made properly to begin with.

Breakfast in Vietnam was never sweet

The larger answer is that the whole category of a sweet, light, cereal based breakfast is a European habit, not a global one. Across most of Asia the morning meal is the same kind of food as every other meal: rice or noodles, broth, protein, herbs.

Vietnam has a whole class of these. Chao, rice porridge with chicken, for someone who wants something soft. Banh cuon, steamed rice rolls, eaten standing up. Bun bo Hue in the centre of the country, which is spicier and more aggressive than pho and also a morning food. Com tam, the Saigon plate of broken rice with grilled pork, which is a morning staple in the south and a full meal before nine.

Against that backdrop, hot beef noodle soup at seven in the morning is unremarkable. It is only strange if you grew up expecting the first meal to be sweet.

Heat, and the timing of appetite

Northern Vietnam has cold winters and hot humid summers, and in both a hot bowl in the morning makes sense for opposite reasons.

In winter it is the obvious warming start to the day. In summer it is timing: by ten in the morning the heat is climbing towards unpleasant, appetite falls off through the middle of the day, and the sensible move is to eat properly before the weather makes eating properly hard. The same instinct that puts hot soup on the table in high summer across the region, which we looked at in why Koreans eat hot soup on the hottest days, runs through the Vietnamese morning too.

Pho is younger and more urban than it seems

Pho is not an ancient dish. It appears in and around Hanoi in the early twentieth century, and the most widely accepted account has it emerging in Nam Dinh province, where a French colonial textile industry created both a market for beef and a workforce that needed feeding early.

That matters here. Beef was not a common meat in Vietnamese cooking before the French presence increased demand for it, and the bones that make pho broth were a byproduct. The noodle itself, banh pho, is a flat rice noodle with clear Chinese lineage. Pho is a street food invented for workers, sold by vendors carrying the whole operation on a shoulder pole, and it kept the hours of the people it was invented for.

The southern version most of the world knows, sweeter and served with a plate of herbs, bean sprouts and hoisin, developed later and moved abroad after 1975. The Hanoi original is starker: clear broth, scallion, a squeeze of lime, maybe chilli, and nothing else on the table.

Frequently asked questions

Do Vietnamese people ever eat pho at night?

Yes, but it is the exception and it is usually a different kind of shop. The morning trade is the real one. Late night eating in Vietnam leans towards other things entirely, like banh mi, grilled meat or rice plates.

Why is pho served with herbs in some places and not others?

Regional difference. Southern Vietnamese pho comes with a plate of Thai basil, sawtooth herb, bean sprouts and lime, plus hoisin and chilli sauce. Northern pho, the original, arrives finished and adding sauce to it is mildly frowned upon.

Is pho Chinese or French?

Both, and Vietnamese. The flat rice noodle and the technique of a spiced clear broth are Chinese. The habit of simmering beef bones for stock arrived with the French. The assembly, the herbs and the balance are Vietnamese, and the result is not really either parent.

Can I make pho broth faster?

You can make a good broth in about three hours with a pressure cooker, though it will be less clear. What you cannot shortcut is the charring of the ginger and onion or the toasting of the spices, and those take ten minutes and carry most of the aroma.

What to cook

Pho bo is the full overnight project and worth doing once properly to understand what the skimming is for. Pho ga, the chicken version, is a third of the work and a reasonable weeknight target. And if you want the rest of a Vietnamese morning, chao ga is the soft option and banh cuon is the one worth the effort.