Pho Sam

Location: 14 Oxford St, Epping NSW 2121

Taste-Type: Vietnamese

Price: Raw Beef Noodle Soup $8, Spring Rolls $6.80

How to get there: Bus or train to Epping station, then walk up the right-hand side of Oxford Street.

Contact: 02-98690499

From dawn’s gumtree mantle to the asphalt fall of night, the day has stretched itself like a thin shadow across a lonely flame. My eyes sting from dusty flecks kicked up by the road, and a clammy pall of weariness adheres itself across my shoulders. I need some noodles.

Pho Sam, wedged inconspicuously into the increasingly-upmarket Oxford Street, is a homely refuge for various reviled types including university students, transit officers, and ninjas. This probably has something to do with their prices rather than their no-frills wooden tiling and exposed (and always bustling) kitchen. Most dishes are around $10, and unlike many other discount-dining options these are no chimeras of plastic pho and MSG. The restaurant’s food has a brusque honesty to it, one which extends to everything from the guttural Canto-Vietnamese barks of the head waitress to the bare-bones fish tank to the Garfield tip-jar on the counter. It feels little like the airbrushed Northern Sydney of today.

The large posters on Pho Sam’s walls indicate to the uninformed (or potentially illiterate) customer which dishes are considered specialties. These include the Vietnamese “3 Combination” (a rice dish not related to the gong fu training routine), the Fried Spring Rolls, and the Raw Beef Noodle Soup, amongst others. I have tried the Spring Rolls on previous occasions; they are consistently flaky-crispy and possessing of a fiery-gold sheen which is rather alluring, and while the meat fillings are not of the highest quality they remain juicy and finely spiced. I recommend them for lunch in particular; however, it is late and I am hungry, and an evil Face is telling me to get the Raw Beef Noodle Soup. Ninjas do well to listen to omens.

The Noodle Soup arrives within a few minutes despite the hubbub; however, wait times can vary significantly, so take-away is the safest choice for the time-conscious. The flat rice noodles are plain but hide a sumptuous home-grown taste which eases my twitchy nerves. The silky earthiness of each strand brings back echoes of faraway rice paddies and I dip into them with gusto. I taste an undercurrent of MSG within the broth, but the warm tan colour and expansive heat (of flavour and temperature) blend together in hearty chorus: no complaint from this side of Saigon.  The beef is a tad too raw for my personal taste – I rarely use flamethrowers for fear of undercooking a target – but this is easily rectified by dunking the offending pieces into the broth. It remains a tad chewy but with an arresting cut-grind taste which salves the tastebuds.

Pho Sam is a relic of a simpler time, when food could be cheap and good, when ninjas used cunning and not machine-guns. Patrons enter with glum faces and within minutes are smiling and laughing, happy to shrug off the pall of a long day. They come for the “lack” of ambience as much as the food or the price, and I pray to the evil Face that it will stay for many a year.

Tagged as: asian, beef noodle soup, cheap and good, cheap eats, cheap food, chinese, eppin restaurant, epping food, epping pho review, evil face, hideaway, inexpensive dining, noodles, pho, pho review, pho sam, pho sam epping, pho sam review, raw beef noodle soup, spring roll, supernatural, vietnam, vietnamese, vietnamese cuisine, vietnamese food, vietnamese takeaway