At District Saigon in Astoria, Queens, there is always a pot of pho broth making a low quarrel on the stove, with eddies of marrow from sunken bones. The broth has to hit the eight-hour mark before Lam Lien, the chef, will even consider serving it.

The recipe is his mother’s, described on the menu as “secret,” although the ingredients are traditional: onions, shallots and ginger charred until they evoke volcanic artifacts; spices that blur fragrance and flavor, among them cinnamon, cloves, fennel, star anise, cardamom and coriander; and, once the broth is strained, final anointments of fish sauce and yellow rock sugar, shattered with a hammer.

The secret — according to his son, Michael, who cooks alongside him — is the balance. What arrives at the table is a finely tempered bowl of soup clear but lush on the tongue, with no one flavor lording above the others.

The baseline pho comes with round steak and Angus brisket, poached and cut into tissue-thin strips that shimmy when lifted and practically dissolve on the tongue. If you like, they will add skinny laces of tripe, which yield peaceably to the teeth, and knobs of gelatinous tendon, which do not. The broth is good, delicate and substantial at once, profound without belligerence.