Nam Viet Pho
January 1999

For a quick, light, satisfying meal before or after a movie at the Uptown Theater, consider one of the excellent meal-in-a-bowl soups at Nam-Viet Pho 79. If you've outgrown the wonton soup at Chinese restaurants, try Nam Viet's Vietnamese interpretation, with its melt-in-your-mouth dumplings and generous garnish of roast pork; for something elegantly delicate, look to the Saigon Pork-and-Shrimp Yellow-Noodle Soup; or for a seafood feast that wont weigh you down, choose the rice-noodle soup with shrimp, scallops squid, and fishballs. Skip the pho here, its pleasant but no match for the variously garnished beef-noodle soup at Vietnamese soup kitchen in Virginia, in favor of the red-hot Special Hue Spicy Beef with Noodle Soup.

A little more than two years after it opened to favorable reviews, Nam-Viet Pho 79 is now staking a claim to the title of the best Vietnamese restaurant in the District. Veterans of the local Vietnamese circuit who sample such house specialties as a robustly seasoned chicken curry spiked with slivers of fresh ginger; the garlicky Hanoi Grilled Pork; a casserole of plump shrimp with quartered shallots, inundated in caramel sauce; and Vietnamese Orange Chicken may well be inclined to agree that this kitchen matches the best in Northern Virginia.