Vietnamese banh mi is now bar food, spring rolls are a festival snack and many neighborhoods across the city have not just their own outpost for pho but competing options. It’s never been easier to find Vietnamese food in New Orleans.
And yet, for the past year plus, I heard audible yearning for the return of one particular Vietnamese restaurant, Pho Tau Bay.
Out of circulation since early 2015, the restaurant recently reopened downtown, at an old-now-new-again location on Tulane Avenue, right across from the haunted hulk of the old Charity Hospital.
The menu is familiar enough for people who love Vietnamese food -- restorative pho; light, fresh rice noodle bowls; spring rolls; and French drip coffee swirling with condensed milk and humming with caffeine.
Pho Tau Bay has always done these standards well, with a special depth to broth in particular. But there was something else behind the response to this place from the New Orleans noodle slurping public, and I suspect it has to do with Pho Tay Bay’s own role in this city’s infatuation with Vietnamese food.
Pho Tau Bay
1565 Tulane Ave., 504-368-9846
Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (take out until 7 p.m.)