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| - BAC drew us in with the picture of their pho they put on their website. If you haven't seen the picture yet, it's a shining spectacle of pho erotica: a towering mound of rare beef emerges from a glorious white bowl of steaming broth, surrounded by glimmering, floating shards of basil and crisp bean sprouts. Enough to merit a trip to Tremont without even glancing at the rest of the menu.
We took advantage of the inviting outdoor patio at Bac, which sits facing one of the dozens of beautiful old European churches in Tremont. A nice place to linger in the sleepy Cleveland July sun and eat pho. The lunch menu at Bac allows you tag on one of a dozen "bento items" to your main lunch course for an extra three bucks. There's all kinds of interesting stuff, from bacon guacamole to the more conventional spring roll. We went the boring route, adding a spring roll and a gyoza to our pho orders. These came out quick, and made a great first impression: fresh, or near-fresh wrappers, with delicious, gingery, slightly sweet home-made filling in each. The pot-stickers had that lovely pan-fried texture: crisped on the bottom in oil, then hit with a liquid to steam them throughout.
The pho comes out to your table exactly like it looks in the photo: impressive and mouth-watering. Unfortunately, though, the pho needs to be re-engineered. The small bowl is packed with noodles, and I mean packed. Although these noodles are delicious, they crowd the bowl and leave little room for broth. The small amount of liquid cools down rapidly at the table, leaving you with lukewarm soup by your second bite. Lukewarm soup brings any meal, pho, or otherwise, to a crashing halt. It is a particularly grave problem with pho, since you are counting on that broth to cook your rare beef.
Our pho experience ended with half-eaten bowls of tepid soup and a pile of defeated, uncooked pink beef at the bottom. The flavors of the pho were excellent - the broth was rich and meaty with a faint sweetness and hint of chinese five-spice, the noodles were cooked perfectly, and the accompanying plate of pho fixins' featured fresh and crisp basil, bean sprouts, jalapeños and limes. The temperature issue, however, needs a solution, whether it's using bigger bowls, fewer noodles, or simply making sure that the broth is piping-hot from the outset and that there is enough staff present to run the soup to the table promptly.
It's obvious that Bac is bigger than its pho. The flavors, freshness, presentation, decor, and ambience are products of people in the know in both the front and back of the house; the attention to detail is impressive and the menu selection combines creativity with respect to Vietnamese culinary tradition. In this reviewer's humble opinion, however, it needs to fix the pho issue to shore up its already excellent reputation.
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