Teo Bun Bo Hue Vietnamese Soup Shop

Chicken or beef?

You don't need a menu at Teo Bun Bo Hue.

The friendly server at this tastefully appointed Vietnamese soup shop—adorned with museum-sized blowups of rice paddies and town markets—will ask you only one question: chicken or beef?

There is no wrong answer.

Teo Bun Bo Hue
(Emily Joan Greene)

Beef (both bowls are $10.50) means bun bo Hue, which also includes pork. Just as Randy is the other Quaid, bun bo Hue is the other great noodle soup of Vietnam.

Pho is the universally likable star, a deeply savory stock laced with sugar. But bun bo Hue is much more interesting—a whirlwind of spicy, sour and sweet swimming with iron-rich cakes made from blood, fish cakes and funny beef and pork parts you might have to pick out of your teeth.

And dear Lord, it can be good when done right. Teo—located in an 82nd Avenue mini-mall full of other East Asian eateries—offers the best version I've had in town, forgoing a lot of the chili-oiled heat for sweet-floral richness, served up with a salad of sprouts, coriander leaves and purple shiso. Multiple pepper sauces adorn each table, but none are necessary.

That said, the chicken pho is even better. It is a pure and rich chicken stock stuffed with noodles and bone-in chicken, like something your grandmother would try to inject you with as a cure for the flu. The side salad is mostly a pile of lightly vinegared frisee, which I'd advise doing without in the soup until you've already eaten the noodles. The depth of chicken flavor is addictive and rare, a piece of South Asian homestyle that doesn't need complicating.

Teo Bun Bo Hue Chicken pho (Emily Joan Greene)

A friend, after eating here for the first time, returned five times in two weeks. It turned out Teo Bun Bo Hue's soup was now the only thing he wanted on gray days. And lately, days like that are the only ones we get. MATTHEW KORFHAGE.

EAT: Teo Bun Bo Hue, 8220 SE Harrison St., No. 230, 208-3532. 9 am-9 pm daily.

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