When Le Thiep and Binh Ngo first opened Pho 75 in Arlington in 1985, their no-frills, cash-only soup house struggled to draw customers. They stuck it out, and eventually lines formed out the door. Now, nearly 40 years later, the business started by two like-minded Vietnamese refugees has become an institution in the DMV.
Named in reference to the year Saigon fell to communism, 1975, Pho 75 was one of the first pho shops in the region. The partners who founded it were an unlikely pair: an established journalist (Thiep) and a university student (Ngo) who met as refugees in California, where there was a large Vietnamese diaspora.
Ngo’s youngest son, Chi Ngo, explains that his father was 12 years younger than Thiep, and it was unusual in Vietnamese culture for a pair with that large of an age gap to become friends. But the two “just really had the same kind of thinking,” which his dad attributes to their shared zodiac symbol, the monkey, Chi says. They talked about politics — and reminisced about the pho they missed in their homeland.
They really got to know each other when they returned to Vietnam in the early 1980s to join a small movement trying to regain control of their country from the communists, Chi says. Not having success, they returned to the U.S., and Thiep, who was driving across the country to DC for a conference, invited Ngo to join him to see this area, which was home to a smaller Vietnamese contingent than the one in California.
The duo started discussing opening a pho restaurant and knew there would be much less competition in the DMV than in California, but there was a large enough community to support it. The members of that community jumped in to help the fledgling business in the first couple of months after it opened, cleaning tables or washing dishes, Chi says. “A lot of the older people that helped us were with the organization for 15, 20-plus years before they recently retired,” he says.
Cooking Up Success
The partners focused their efforts on creating a great soup. But about 18 months into their venture, with six months left on their two-year lease, Chi says the partners were not sure they should continue. Two additional partners who had been part of the business decided to go back to California. That’s when a review in The Washington Post put Pho 75 “on the map for Westerners,” expanding the customer base, and changing everything, Chi says. Soon, there were lines of customers waiting for tables, and they were able to open a second location, in Falls Church.
Sticking with simplicity and tradition has always been key at Pho 75, from the simple, cafeteria-like interior and quick service to the recipe for the soup itself, which is made in a style that comes from Northern Vietnam. “Northern is not bland, but it’s more stark. It focuses on less flavorful ingredients, and it keeps more to like just the bare bones, the basics of soup,” Chi says. “If you notice, we really don’t do anything fancy with the soup. We don’t really do any of the crazy vegetables or accoutrements that you would see. We’re very much simple.” He says that’s the difference between northern and southern pho, because “up North, there’s less to grow,” so there isn’t an abundance of materials to create side dishes. “Up North, it’s very simple. That’s the style that both the partner and my dad followed when they went into this business.”
Pho 75 has seen change over the years, of course. It has expanded to eight locations, including four in Northern Virginia (Arlington, Falls Church, Herndon, and Centreville), two in Maryland, and two in Philadelphia. Staffing has been kept tight, to about seven or eight people per shop. And each new restaurant is headed up by one of the “partners” who has been working at another location, usually for many years. “All of our employees eventually become our partners,” says Dung Phan, Thiep’s nephew, who’s a spokesman for the restaurants. Partners share a profit with the founders that is proportional to the stores they manage.
Many of them started out as servers or busboys and have spent decades working for Pho 75. That opportunity to stay with the business long-term is unusual for a restaurant, Phan says, but it’s part of the culture at Pho 75. Those who don’t have the “inspiration” to work are filtered out, but “those people that stay with us eventually become our partners,” he says.
The menu “has always been the same,” Phan says. It offers the soup with noodles and various types of protein. Still, some recipes have been altered over the years to reflect the tastes of the customers at various locations, explains Chi. In Arlington, for example, in the early 2000s, some regulars started asking for only chicken breast in their soup, instead of the traditional combination of white and dark meat, saying it was healthier. About five years ago, Arlington customers started asking for dark meat again, after hearing it had healthy elements. So, the cook added it back in. At the Falls Church location, however, it has always been a combination of white and dark meat, Chi says.
In Vietnam, pho is an everyday food that’s eaten year-round, often for breakfast. Here in the U.S., though, Chi says the restaurants see their biggest crowds when comfort food is in order: rainy days, or the day after what he thinks of as big drinking holidays, like New Year’s Day or the day after Halloween.
Chi, who now runs the Arlington store, says he trusts his long-time customers to help him make small changes to the soup or to let him know if something tastes off — which can be difficult for him and the staff to tell since they taste it so frequently. He admits that he was not a fan of pho as a child, wishing instead that his parents would take him to McDonald’s, like his friends. He gained appreciation, though, as a teen and started working at Pho 75 in high school, then returned after college.
He’s watched the restaurant’s clientele grow over the years as customers date, get married, and have children. “These kids who were 4 [when they started coming to the shop with their parents] are telling me about how they’re going to college, or whatever it is, and I’m like, ‘Whoa. Your mom used to drag you in here and you were just causing a mess all the time, and now you’re going to college?’ I get the honor to see that. They choose to come back and eat,” Chi says.
Cashing In
Accepting only cash in a day and age where credit cards have become the norm is also based in tradition, simplicity — and an avoidance of fees to pay. “Every restaurant has a choice. Easy answer: It’s because of the fees,” Chi says. “The other answer, I guess, is it started out like that, so we’ll just keep it the same. … Having it as cash-only really just fully encapsulates the Pho 75 spirit of us being independent and not really paying attention to people and doing our own thing,” he laughs. “We’re just real simple. Just the basics.”
While the eight locations have the same trade name, they are separate companies, Phan says. The most recent shop opened in Centre-ville in July. Tuan Vu, who cooked at the Falls Church shop for 30 years, is now cooking there.
Chi says they follow an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, and Phan agrees.
“We’re happy the way we are,” Phan says. “We’re doing fine, and I really like the way we are. Why change when you don’t have to?”
‘Right Time, Right Place … Right People’
Thiep and Ngo created a lasting legacy and a tight-knit group of partners. Chi looks around the Arlington shop and can point to servers who’ve worked with the organization for more than 30 years. He grew up seeing them at the shops or visiting his dad at the family’s home. He isn’t sure what the future holds as far as opening additional locations — that’s something that happens as the opportunity presents itself, he and Phan say — but he has a clear respect for the chance Thiep and his father took to achieve their success.
“The boat-people mentality … There’s no real fear. If you didn’t die on a boat already, there’s nothing here that’s really going to kill you,” Chi says, describing what he believes was the partners’ mindset.
His says his father “essentially tried to escape Vietnam twice. The first time, he went to jail for eight months. The boat — I think the engine died when they were about to make it out of the bay, or the captain snitched on them.” But Chi says his dad met some “really great people” while he was in jail, who helped him along the way. Ngo tried to escape again and made it to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where he enjoyed organizing volleyball teams while applying to countries for asylum. His top three choices were countries in Europe, but when none of them accepted him, he wound up in California, where he initially stayed with the relatives of someone he met in jail, Chi says.
Thiep died in 2013, and Ngo is now retired and travels with his wife but still spends a lot of time at Pho 75’s various locations, visiting his friends and partners. “He’ll come to say, ‘Hi;’ he’ll always grab a bowl of pho,” Chi says. “He really does believe in the current partners and the next generation coming up. I’ve asked him multiple times … ‘How did you get seven restaurants, now eight?’ And he told me, ‘I did not think I would get there.’ That’s not how he thinks. For him, it was mostly right time, right place, then finding the right people to open up the restaurants with, because to him, it’s not about how much the business can make, the economics of it. It’s about the people that are involved in it. At the end of the day, if the people that are involved in it aren’t working together or don’t see the same picture, then no matter how good the margins are, it’ll all fall apart.”
— Will Vitka contributed to this story.
Feature image by Shannon Ayres
This story originally ran in our February issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.