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I’m known as Mr Spicy Mince Chicken Basil at The Blue, and the only problem I have with this nickname is that I will never be as brilliant as their rendition of the Bangkok-born street food classic. Although I often overorder the pad krapow gai (spicy mince chicken basil) with two gorgeous sunny sides up eggs atop it, when it comes to The Blue, I always have room for more of their menu, whether it be the Five Spice Duck or the Mushroom Gyoza.
However, up until recently, I had no idea I could order Pho, an off menu treat. Strangely enough, I learnt this information during a shared cab ride in Goa. It sounded too good to be true, but when I cornered Seefah, co-owner and head Thai chef at The Blue, and asked her about it, she smiled and said, “Of course I can make you Pho.” The little lady didn’t know it, but dreams had just been made real.
Caution: pathetic Pho puns ahead.
Table Pho Two
To get a steaming bowl of pork or buff Pho (there is no such thing as vegetarian pho), you need to call at least a day before, so the chefs can grab all the necessary ingredients and cook the buff broth for 6 hours and the pork broth for 24 to ensure you get an authentic taste of Vietnam’s most popular culinary export. Make sure to specify how many people the Pho is to be made for because there is no way of quickly whipping up another broth, be it buff or pork.
Also, if the chefs are too busy to make pho for you, don’t throw a temper tantrum and commit a pho faux pas. This dish is off-menu because The Blue is a small restaurant, they have a busy kitchen, and their focus is on Thai and Japanese cuisine. Although they’d love to serve you pho, they won’t always be able to do it, and there are plenty of other delicious dishes to tickle your tastebuds on the menu.
Pho The Love Of God It’s Good
The Blue is in no way a Vietnamese restaurant. Seefah was trained as a Thai chef and her husband, Karan, was trained as a Japanese chef. Together they serve up a balance of both cuisines, which coexist instead of joining the realm of fusion food. Seefah loves pho and makes a habit of cooking dishes she loves. “I always learn to make the food I like! That way it is easy for me to get to eat the food I love,” she tells me.
Pho is very much a culinary muse for Seefah. She produces a very orthodox beef broth, which is clear to the eye and rich and marrowy to the tongue, the ultimate indicator of a good pho. Before you toss in any garnish, chilli sauce, or fish sauce it is of paramount importance to take an unadulterated slurp of broth from a duck spoon and revel in the, hopefully, rich liquid. Needless to say, Seefah nails it.
Although a lot of the flavour comes from cooking the beef stock for quite a few hours, she also adds a hunk of turnip to the broth to bring out the flavour of the vegetables and finishes off the pho by bathing the uncooked slices of buff in the broth. This technique produces very rare and tender buff, offering an almost melt-in-your-mouth effect.
Now, because we live in Mumbai, Seefah uses buff. Yet, her talent as a chef rings true by using a less fatty meat, with a darker hue, and still serving up a dish that can compete with a beef tenderloin counterpart. By using buff the dish winds up being a lot healthier as well, as water buffalo meat contains less fat and cholesterol and more protein compared to beef.
For the pork pho, she makes the wise decision of using pork shoulder. By cooking the typically tough meat for 24 hours, the cut provides the perfect combination of fat to meat. Use pork belly and the texture of the meat will become uniformly soft, and a bit too gelatinous for pho, in particular. Use pork shoulder for slow and low cooking, and the consistency of the pork morsel will be juicy and tender.
The pork broth is not as rich as the buff one and is far more translucent. If you’d like a lighter pho I’d definitely recommend you try the pork.
Seefah allows her adept palate to add some hints of Thai influence, most notably the Thai chilli sauce garnish, instead of the traditional Vietnamese fish sauce topping. And, of course, there is no shortage of fresh basil.
The Road To Pho-rtune
Bandra has been blessed with the presence of The Blue, the small interior almost always packed with folks eager to chow down on some scrumptious Thai and Japanese food. However, behind every self-made, successful restaurant, there are hard years of busting away in the kitchen. For Seefah and Karan, their paths crossed in 2011, at Mumbai’s Four Seasons’ premier restaurant San Qi. After five years of long hours and hard work, they built up the confidence and capital to branch out on their own. However, they first wanted to see if the authentic Thai and Japanese food they wanted to serve up in Mumbai would click with the city’s palate.
In 2016 they started doing pop-ups and private dinners in South Mumbai, where they garnered a large following of patrons who couldn’t get enough of their fantastic food. This encouraged them to finally unveil The Blue, named after Seefah (her name means blue in Thai).
Nowadays their little Bandra nook churns out an unfathomable amount of food from their tiny kitchen, pleasing dinner guests Tuesday through Sunday.
The prosperity of their restaurant can be traced to a couple of factors. Firstly, as chefs who spent a good portion of their careers following the dogmatic demands, one encounters while working for a Five Star. Now they’ve regained their ability to cook what they want, and they love to cook their respective cuisines the genuine way.
Seefah recalls once having to make a Jain Thai curry. “Onion and garlic are at the base of any curry. Yet I had to make them a Thai curry without these essentials.” As tempting as it was for Seefah to disobey the order and prevent her complicity in the bastardization of a quintessential Thai dish, she had to commit what seemed to her like the ultimate culinary sin. “They would have known if I made it with them,” she explains, a look of chagrin covering her usually bright face.
With her own successful restaurant, Seefah sure is pleased she’ll never have to make Jain Thai curry again and will leave that memory as a painful paradox that life threw at her.
Secondly, Seefah and Karan love to cook. The only time they leave their kitchen is to travel to Japan and Thailand to cook up a storm, find new recipes, and eat enough street food to choke a horse. It may seem like a given that all chefs love to cook and constantly are throwing dishes together, but after producing a successful restaurant many put their ambition on cruise control and take a back seat. From my interactions, I doubt this an issue Seefah or Karan will ever have.
With Seefah and Karan bagging the Times 2018 Chef of the Year award and The Blue earning the Noteworthy Newcomer award it looks like this restaurant will have a long record of spoiling Bandra’s (and beyond) food lovers.
How Much Pho Pho
As they are off menu dishes Seefah is reluctant to post the prices. Do not fear, they are absolutely reasonable.
Other Phonominal Off-Menu Dishes
If you call ahead Seefah and Karan are happy to throw together some Northern Thai specialities if the time and ingredients avail themselves. So if you fancy yourself a foodie, ask for Thai Khao Soi or Northern Thai Pork Chili.
Is It Pho Real
People fuss far too much as to what constitutes as an ‘authentic pho’. Even in Vietnam, there are notable differences in pho, the most obvious being the difference in toppings of Northern Pho (Hanoi Pho) as opposed to Southern Pho (Saigon Pho) toppings. Southern style pho is the template most Vietnamese restaurants outside of Vietnam use, due to the mass immigration from the south of the country from 1975 onwards. However, many Northern Vietnamese maintain their version of pho is where the authenticity lies.
So if you say The Blue’s pho is not authentic, you are technically right but are also stating the obvious. Seefah’s pho is slightly tweaked to cater to Thai tastes but otherwise subscribes to authentic methods, especially adhering to the quality of a good broth. So in this case, I seriously suggest you just let your taste buds do the thinking instead.
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