The Twin Cities' Pioneer Press reporter John Brewer is a big guy. And he likes to eat. But he may have just met his match in the Pho King Challenge:
Pitting diners against massive bowls of the Vietnamese beef noodle soup is a regular occurrence at Saigon. The restaurant started offering the pho challenge as a means to bring back customers when it reopened at its new location last year.
The reward: Winners get their soup free and a T-shirt proclaiming, "I am the pho-king." Losers pay $15 for their soup. Of the 500 customers who have tried, only 120 have left victorious — and almost all are Asian men.
"It's like eating five or six bowls of regular pho," warned
Bui, when I sat down to take the challenge.
She then went on to explain the rules: The soup has to be finished within 45 minutes; no bathroom breaks are allowed; and getting sick at the table is instant disqualification. Oh, and by the way, the record time to date — 9 1/2 minutes — was set by an Asian guy who couldn't have weighed more than 130 pounds."White guys think they can finish because they're big," Bui said. "But Asians know noodles."
Did John do it? Or did he lose pho-cus at the end? Link - via metafilter
Who ever was serving you Pho must have been messing with ya. It's not supposed to be raw.
'Pho-cus' (from Alex's text) on the other hand, sounds like, um, something that rhymes with 'duck us'. :P
Raw? What are you on about? Everything in Pho is cooked. Once it goes into hot broth, it's cooked through and ready to slurp.