Traditional and fusion come together at Manchester restaurant
For Chris Caddy, owner of What The Pho!, a new noodle and tiki bar in Manchester, designing a menu is about striking balances — between sweet and sour, spicy and savory, fusion and authentic. It’s a lot to keep in mind. For instance, how many different flavors or textures should you include in a dish?
“I’m trying to get multiple layers of flavors,” Caddy said. “But when you get to more than three flavor profiles, everything gets muddied.” He used What the Pho!’s beef carpaccio as an example. Traditionally a carpaccio is an appetizer made of thinly sliced, often raw, meat or fish with a sauce. For a lot of restaurants a carpaccio’s simplicity can be a trap: Too much ornamentation or competing flavors will cover up the subtleties of the protein, but if it’s not complemented in some way, there’s a danger it will just sit there and slide into a single flavor profile that loses the eater’s attention after the first bite.
Caddy worked to keep each element on his carpaccio plate simple but to provide a bite or two of side dishes to give enough of a contrast to let the beef shine through. The beef is lightly seasoned.
“There’s a toasted sesame aioli and chili oil,” he said, “and then we finish it with Himalayan sea salt. In the center there’s a little salad of cucumber and sweet onions to offset it with something cool and tossed in our poke sauce. And then we’ve got some kettle chips on the side for crunch. You’ve got different mouthfeels, you’ve got different textures and different flavors.”
As a non-Asian chef, Caddy said perfecting a quintessentially Vietnamese dish like pho — a rich, spicy noodle soup, pronounced ‘fuh’ — involved a lot of trial and error.
“It was an intensive, every single day, multiple-hour learning curve,” he said, “just researching, researching, researching, buying different ingredients I was unfamiliar with, and just tons and tons of asking questions.” One of those questions was how authentic he wanted his pho to be.
“The thing is, we’re not a pho place,” Caddy said. “We’re an Asian fusion place. And pho, it’s in the name, and I want to draw people in with that. I’m addicted to pho myself. But what I wanted isn’t a perfectly traditional pho.” And the key to a great pho is in the broth. “Every time I’ve heard a Vietnamese person talk about pho, they go into how hard it is to get the broth right. Of course, if you’re from the Vietnamese culture, you’re carrying cultural expectations with you.” Because he wasn’t trying to be authentically Vietnamese, Caddy had a little more wiggle room in how he prepared his broth. “I roast the bones so we get a darker, richer flavor,” he said. “And all the usual suspects are there — the coriander, the ginger, the cinnamon, the cardamom, and all the charred onions and all that — but one of the things I wanted to do was give it more depth. Finally we reached the point where we said, ‘Let’s not do anything more with it.’ So we’re trying to stay in the ballpark, but I’m trying to elevate things slightly So it’s not, you know, it’s not the same exact [soup] as when you walk into like a little mom-and-pop Vietnamese place. It’s going to be a slightly different thing.”
For Caddy and his staff, the mission is to give the same level of attention to the food, their cocktails and the restaurant’s decor.
“When you can do that with the drinks,” Caddy said, “and with the food, the fun thing for me is when I watch people just enjoying everything we’ve created. It makes me really happy. That’s kind of the payoff for me.”
What The Pho!
836 Elm St., Manchester (next to Bookery and Cat Alley)
606-8769, whatthephorestaurant.com
Open seven days a week: Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m to 9 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday, 4 to 10 p.m., and Sunday, 4 to 9 p.m.
Orders can be placed online for pickup.
Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.