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Pho Ga You Won’t Forget
Photo: Grub Street
The only thing Tony Le will reveal about the broth he makes for his Chinatown restaurant Pho Ga Vang is that it takes two days to prepare. “I’m very secretive about what I do because it’s a family recipe,” he says. He lists a few other guidelines he’s picked up working in the family business, like “sell the soup” and “close when you run out.” He chops chicken, its skin as yellow as an emoji, fresh to order so it stays juicy. Le’s broth is sweet and pure, seasoned with ginger and onion and what seems like more than a pinch of MSG. Along with the rice noodles, there’s scallion greens, cilantro, and sliced white onion bobbing in it. “Yes,” he concedes, “I do baby the soup.”
Pho Ga Vang opened a few weeks ago on Market Street, around the corner from Golden Diner and Bánh by Lauren. There’s bo kho, plates of vermicelli noodles with grilled meats, beef pho, the Pho Tony (with steak, brisket, meatball, and chicken), and a few different options for pho ga, including one made with chicken that’s been treated to a lemongrass marinade and grilled until blackened. (There’s another with gizzard and liver — in theory. It hasn’t been available either time I’ve been in.)
This is the second location of the restaurant. Le opened the first in the D.C. suburbs in early 2023. The Washingtonian named Pho Ga Vang one of the “100 Very Best Restaurants” of 2024, calling the chicken soup “some of the richest and most soothing” they’ve encountered. But Le comes to New York by way of Philadelphia, originally, where his parents opened the famous Pho Ga Thanh Thanh. In 2019, he left Philly and, with business partner Vinh Nguyen, opened Pho Ga Tony Tony in Norcross, Georgia’s Little Saigon. It was a hit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s critic called the soup “nothing less than liquid magic.” While Le and Nguyen expressed ambitions to open a small chain, they only opened one other location. Both eventually closed. “Atlanta didn’t work out because it was a bad partnership and I ended up getting a lawyer to sue my partner,” Le says. In February 2022, he opened a restaurant in Las Vegas (he is no longer involved), then another in Philadelphia (it, too, has closed).
At Pho Ga Vang, Le says that he benefited from the fact that customers were familiar with his parents’ restaurant. “They knew that it was the same brand, which is why we were pretty successful in Virginia,” he says. That’s one reason why he’s now taking a shot at New York: In Philadelphia, customers who’d come down from New York asked them to open here. As for choosing Chinatown? “I don’t know nothing about New York,” Le says. “I don’t know why I choose to open there.” He found the space in an ad on Facebook Marketplace. The streets seemed busy. He thought he’d found a good deal, but it ended up taking five months to open because, he says, the gas meter had been removed.
Before starting his own chicken-soup ventures, Le worked at his parents’ restaurant for 20 years. (In New York, he has a framed photo of the original location on the wall, next to chicken-themed decorations like a “Cocky” poster with a flexing rooster.) Le’s parents, Hoa Nguyen and Chuong Le, were refugees who landed in California and later moved their family to Pennsylvania to open a nail salon. That business didn’t work out, but Pho Ga Thanh Thanh became renowned enough that, as the Philadelphia Inquirer critic Craig LaBan wrote, Hoa simply became known as “the chicken lady.” When she got sick in 2017, her four children all became more involved, and she taught each of them to make the family’s pho ga recipe. The restaurant is now owned by Le’s sister Elizabeth Nguyen, who trademarked the name and family recipe and says there is no relationship between Pho Ga Thanh Thanh and Pho Ga Vang, run by Le. “If he does well, I’m happy for him and his family,” Elizabeth says.
Elizabeth, of course, is also aware of how many Pho Ga Thanh Thanh customers come down from New York: They still do. After opening a second location in Philadelphia this May, she now has her sights set on Queens, where she’ll kick off a “grand plan,” as she once put it, to go nationwide. It sounds like a family rivalry could play out in the five boroughs, though in New York, there is plenty of room, and then some, for more pho ga. “We’re opening in Long Island City within the next eight months,” Elizabeth says. “It’s in the works already.”
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