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Photo by Tony Caldwell / Postmedia Network

Last spring, my wife, son, and I visited Umea, a university town in central Sweden. The high-quality produce that we found in Swedish groceries stories was nothing to whine about, but after a few months, my wife and I were besieged by an overwhelming craving for pho. Luckily, we heard about a new Asian fusion restaurant on the outskirts of town that served pho, located in the same sparkling mall as the local Ikea. My wife, son, and I eagerly tucked into our bowls. The tangy, light taste of the broth was new to us, but somehow the owner managed to pull it off, and the Swedish pho house became our sanctuary during bouts of homesickness.

Finally, last September, I returned to Ottawa, now accompanied by my new family. During my absence of over 15 years, pho eateries had mushroomed throughout Ottawa, following the spread of Vietnamese people to the suburbs. In the 1990s, there had been perhaps three pho shops in Chinatown. Now there were about 50 in Ottawa, the same as the number of shawarma shops and a quarter the number of pizzerias. (Montreal has roughly the same number of pho shops, while Toronto has double the number.) One pho shop for every four pizzerias? Where had this phenomenal growth come from?

To understand more about the pho scene revolution, my wife and I embarked on a grand pho tour of the city. In between bowls of noodles steeped in aromatic beef broth, I chatted with three of the owners.

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia

Dennis La, the owner of New Pho Bo Ga La on Somerset Street, is thin and intense and looks a decade younger than his 44 years. He tells me that he worked at Nortel for five years until its collapse. He and his brother, Binh, ran Pho Bo Ga La, then Dennis opened New Pho Bo Ga La across the street. Dennis puts in backbreaking hours at the restaurant, from 10 in the morning to 11 at night. Running the pho restaurant is an affair of “love, sweat, blood, tears,” he acknowledges. “I will die with this restaurant.” By contrast, he recalls working at Nortel as “relaxing.”