Duck soup on Eat Street: No funny business at Pho 79

Who would have thunk it? An American icon is hiding out in a Vietnamese noodle house in Minneapolis.

Pho 79, 2529 Nicollet Ave. S., Minneapolis. For information, call (612) 871-4602.

We’re talking Pho 79 on Nicollet Avenue. They do all the soups, salads, and cracked rice dishes that Americans have come to love since Vietnamese immigrants began to arrive in significant numbers in the 1970s. Hidden in the menu of 35 different soups, eight rice noodle salads, six broken rice entrees, and assorted appetizers, drinks, and desserts, is Pho 79’s very tasty duck soup.

“Duck soup” is American slang, a black-and-white film from the 30s, and, of course, the Marx Brothers. Max Dechare, in his dictionary of hipster slang Straight From the Fridge, Dad, defines it this way:

In the writings of Dashiell Hammett this means a sure thing, something very easily accomplished. However, Nelson Algren uses it to mean something strange and not quite as it should be: “‘I hope he knows what he’s doin’ is all,’ Mama T. observed dubiously. ‘It looked queer as duck soup to me.’” (From the novel Never Come Morning, 1941.)

For the Marx Brothers, it meant whatever the hell they wanted it to mean.

At Pho 79, duck soup means a big bowl full of light broth and egg noodles. Into this you get to squeeze lime juice and add bean sprouts, holy basil, and small pieces of very hot chiles. Then it’s up to you to dissect a marinated quarter-duck and plop it into the soup. All the work is worth it: The soup is delicious.

The bonus is that this treat is served up by courteous and efficient waitstaff. They take care of business, but it isn’t hard to tease a smile out of them. Their clientele includes Madame Nu wannabes, Chinese dowagers, Vietnamese tough guys and their molls, twenty-something hipsters, college students, and workmen taking a break from their labors. Even my buddy Jimmy—the German Catholic who rarely ventures outside of St. Mark’s Parish in St. Paul—gives it an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

It’s fun, it’s cheap, and it’s quick. $8.50-$10.00 plus a tip, and you are out of there. Jeremy Iggers and Carla Waldemer, king and queen of the fressors: Where have you been? Find your way to Pho 79…it’s duck soup.

David Wilson (dlwilson26@msn.com) is a housing consultant and recovering anthropologist from Paterson, New Jersey by way of the University of Michigan and north Africa. He currently lives in Minneapolis.