Fall brings beautiful scenery and very cold temperatures. All I want to do is eat noodle soup when it’s cold outside. For this, I head over to Turtle Tower.
Turtle Tower claims to be authentic Hà N?i Style Vietnamese Cuisine. I’m not sure because I’ve never been. Normally, this is a place where people get their pho fix and other rice dishes. Just in case you’re new to pho:
Ph? or pho is a Vietnamese soup consisting of broth, rice noodles, herbs, and meat – usually beef, sometimes chicken. Pho is a popular street food in Vietnam and served in restaurants around the world.
They also offer other tradition items like banh mi sandwiches, grilled pork or chicken, and other stir fried items. For me, I go for the pho but not the beef version. When I’m at other pho places, I get the beef soup with beef balls, brisket, tripe, tendons, rare steak, etc… Here, I always get the Ph? Gà which is an organic free-range chicken noodle soup.
For some magical reason I enjoy the pho chicken soup more than the other shops. With that said, I enjoy the beef pho at other places than Turtle Tower. So I’m sitting here wondering why I love their pho ga so much. I’ll try to break it down. The green onion and cilantro toppings are normal. Which then leaves the noodles, chicken, and broth. This place has never given me a soggy or undercooked noodle. They have the science down on making sure the noodle is the right consistency. The chicken tastes great. I guess that’s what you can expect from an organic chicken. But I feel like they use their steamed chicken and pull out the meat instead of boiling the chicken meat to make the broth. It’s a great tactic and lets the chicken taste like chicken. I think the real winner is the broth. I know, how hard is it to mess up a chicken broth? It’s not difficult to mess up the broth. More importantly, their broth is very delicious and clear. The only times I come close to making my broth taste as good as theirs is when I boil down all the chicken bones, break them, squeeze out the marrow, and keep boiling. But this makes my broth very cloudy. I’m not sure how they do it and I’m not sure if I want to know how and lose that sense of aww with the magical broth.
If you’re in San Francisco. Try them out. Let me know what you think.
Turtle Tower
501 6th Street San Francisco, CA 94103 (415) 904-9888
