The menu at Pho Hòa Huế on Nicollet Avenue lists forty-three items. The owner, who has been working this room since the restaurant opened in the mid-2000s, can tell you which ones most first-timers overlook. He will not volunteer this information unless you ask, but if you ask, he will pull up a chair.
The restaurant sits in the Eat Street corridor on Nicollet, roughly between 24th and 26th, a stretch that has been Minneapolis’s most densely packed block of international restaurants for thirty years. Pho Hòa Huế is specifically Vietnamese — central Vietnamese, which is where the name points you. Huế is the old imperial capital in the middle of the country, and the cooking style there runs spicier and more complex than what you find in the southern-style pho that most American diners know. This distinction matters at Pho Hòa Huế. It explains why the bún bò Huế, a lemongrass-and-shrimp-paste beef noodle soup, is the thing to order here rather than the standard pho — though the pho is also quite good.
On a rainy Tuesday in March, the dining room was about two-thirds full by 11:45 in the morning. That pace held through 1:30. The crowd was mixed: a few construction workers eating quickly, a table of older Vietnamese women who seemed to know the staff by name, a couple of university students splitting a large bowl. The room is plain and functional — bright lighting, laminate tables, a few decorative touches on the walls that nobody came here to look at. All of that is fine. You came here for the soup.
The bún bò Huế arrives in a deep bowl with thick round rice noodles, slices of beef shank, and rounds of pork. The broth is brick-red from annatto oil and chili, fragrant with lemongrass in a way that makes standard pho broth smell thin by comparison. It is not brutal-spicy, but it has heat that builds. A plate of accompaniments comes alongside: bean sprouts, shredded banana blossom, lime, fresh herbs. Add them gradually. The banana blossom, which is mild and slightly starchy, is worth paying attention to — it soaks up broth and changes the texture of the whole bowl.
A large bowl runs around $14 to $16. Appetizers like chả giò (fried spring rolls) are in the $8 range. The portions are generous. Lunch for one person, with a Vietnamese iced coffee, typically comes in under $25 before tip.
Come early if you’re here on a weekend — the dining room fills by noon and the wait can stretch. On a weekday morning, the kitchen is quieter and the service is unhurried. Parking on Nicollet is street parking; metered, usually manageable. The restaurant is also on the 18 bus line, which makes the trip from downtown about ten minutes.
What keeps people coming back to Eat Street in general is that the restaurants there answer to their own communities first. Pho Hòa Huế is not calibrated for novelty-seekers. It is calibrated for people who want a specific, well-executed bowl of soup at a reasonable price on a Tuesday when the weather is bad and they need something that actually helps. It delivers that reliably, which is a harder thing to find than it sounds.
