If you live in Vancouver, you have probably had pho, a beef broth soup served with rice noodles, different types of meats and garnished with bean sprouts, basil and limes.

Green Lemongrass on Kingsway in Vancouver is just one place that you can find the Vietnamese staple, but their secret recipe comes from a long family lineage.

"There's a lot of different flavour profiles that come together and they work together really well," said Patrick Do, who is the owners' son.

"It's meaty but it's not heavy. It's clear but it's full of flavour. It's just perfectly balanced which is a very important ethos of Vietnamese cuisine," he said.

"You can smell it a mile away. When you drive down Kingsway, if you have your windows down in the summertime, you can smell the pho."

From one generation to the next

Yen Do opened the restaurant with her husband when they moved to B.C.

"We put a lot of care into the pho," she said.

They now have two locations, one in Vancouver and another in Richmond.

Yen Do says she learned the family recipes from her mother and cousins.

"I just have the passion to cook. I love food so much. I like to eat," she said.

And it's a passion that runs in the family.

After learning the business from his parents, Patrick decided to open another Vietnamese spot, called House Special with his sister.

But when he branched out on his own, he decided to do Vietnamese with a twist.

"We wanted to do something that was a little bit different, that sort of paid homage to the great lineage cooking that our family has," he explained.

Patrick Do says that the broth is started from scratch each day and is always simmering. (Vivian Luk/CBC)

"Vietnamese restaurants in general right now, you kind of get this snapshot of what Vietnamese restaurants looked like in 1979," Patrick Ho said.

"And I think food has stayed in this amber bubble for that amount of time, and you get this weird cross section of Vietnamese food as it was."

Do says that the food in Vietnam has advanced so much, but many of the restaurants in North America don't reflect that.

But his vision is a bit different.

"We want to be at the forefront of the growth of the cuisine."

With files from The Early Edition and Vivian Luk​

For more soup stories, listen to The Early Edition's series, Soup Season, airing every Tuesday in February: