Pholicious Bún Bò Huế Rice Noodle Soup Review | Noodle Journey Episode 227

Today’s review is a huge surprise I found at my local Walmart from a company whose products I have greatly enjoyed in the past. This is brand new from Pholicious: Bún Bò Huế Beef & Shrimp with Spicy Lemongrass.

The Verdict:

Bún bò huế is my favorite Vietnamese noodle dish to order at a restaurant. Although, I admit I’ve been on a hủ tiếu kick lately, but I love bún bò huế more than phở. And that’s saying something because I really love phở. Bún bò huế is a spicy beef broth made with lemongrass and round noodles. Toppings can include things like pork hocks and pork sausage, although depending on the restaurant, you could also see beef and shrimp like it says here, or even congealed blood as a topping. It’s vibrant. It’s spicy. And it is just so good.

Back in episode 160, I reviewed the only instant bún bò huế I had ever found up until now, from a Vietnamese brand called Simply Food. And it sucked like few things I’ve reviewed have ever sucked. That one will be going on my next bottom 10 list.

So, here we have a bún bò huế variety from Pholicious. In my opinion, Pholicious makes the best instant phở I’ve ever tried. It’s also the most expensive instant phở I’ve ever tried, with the bowls coming in anywhere from $4 to $6 depending on where you buy them. That’s what makes them really hard to recommend in this economy. I can’t argue with the quality of their products, but their pricing is a little prohibitively expensive for an instant product. You can read or watch my Pholicious phở mega-review for all the details.

Since that review and since their, let’s say, controversial partnership on Shark Tank, Pholicious has been coming out with a lot of ramen products, which I think is a misstep from a logistical standpoint because I’d rather see premium Vietnamese products come from them rather than Japanese recipes. And I have reviews of their spicy ramen bowls lined up that I promised one of my viewers I’d do soon, and in that review, I was going to say, “Hey, instead of saturating the market with more spicy ramen, why not make something we don’t have in the US, like an ultra-premium instant hủ tiếu, bún riêu, or bún bò huế?”

Well, I guess they listened to my brain because here is instant bún bò huế, and I couldn’t be more excited to try this. These are currently a Walmart exclusive, but you might be able to buy them directly from the Pholicious website when they come back in stock. I paid $4.93 for a single bowl at Walmart, and it is pretty sizable.

Opening it up, you can see why the price tag is premium due to all the different packets inside. There’s a lot of stuff going on in here. We’ve got flat rice noodles, which are not bún bò huế noodles, but I’ll let it go. We’ve got a spice sachet, a bouillon mix, chili crisp oil, a bún bò huế sauce, dried vegetables, and a convenient little pair of chopsticks if you need them.

The noodles are just rice flour and tapioca starch, but they spelled flour wrong on the label as “flower,” which really makes my hyperfocus on detail twitch. The spice sachet, which is one of Pholicious’s claims to fame, contains star anise and cinnamon. It’s very important that you do not open the white part of this when you cook these noodles. Pholicious does this in their other products – it’s like a tea bag that steeps in your broth while it cooks. I repeat, do not open this bag when you cook this. It will not end well.

In the bouillon, you’ve got things like sugar, salt, beef extract, beef fat, beef tallow, MSG, parsley, garlic, onion, and lots of spices. In the bún bò huế sauce, we’ve got soybean oil, lemongrass, krill paste, artificial beef flavoring, and even more spices. The chili crisp oil is exactly what it sounds like, but it’s Lee Kum Kee Chiu Chow chili oil, and I freaking love this stuff. I have a jar of it in my fridge. This is one of my favorite chili oils. In the vegetable flakes, we’ve got scallion, culantro, basil, and lemongrass. As a side note, I love that they’re using culantro instead of cilantro because culantro does not set off my genetic aversion to cilantro. So, thanks, Pholicious.

All of these premium toppings come with a premium amount of sodium. This is 2,510mg for a single bowl, which is very high if you’re watching your intake.

After cooking, it smells heavenly. I dare say it smells like a restaurant. I don’t think it’s going to taste like a restaurant. That’s a pretty high bar. It is very hard to replicate phở and bún bò huế and stuff like that in instant form just because of the depth and richness, but we’ll see.

I tried the broth first without the chili oil just to see how spicy it is. It’s got a little heat, nothing crazy.

After that first taste, I added the chili oil, which is exactly what’s in the jar in my fridge. I love this stuff. It’s got a really nice spice to it and some extra garlic heft. I think it’s a great chili crisp flavor if you ever spot it at your local Asian supermarket.

Noodles:

I already like Pholicious’s phở noodles. These are pretty much the same thing. They’re not the correct style of noodles for bún bò huế, but I completely understand them not making an entirely new noodle production process just to make those noodles. They’re still really good. They have a nice chew and they separate. Sometimes rice noodles cook up really gummy and clump together, and that’s not the case here. I love their noodles.

• 8/10

Spiciness:

There’s some red pepper that was already in one of the packets, so it’s got a little bit of a kick without the chili oil. With the chili oil, it doesn’t make it crazy hot, but it is noticeably hotter, especially if you have a low spice tolerance. The fact that it’s oil means that the spice kind of gets on your lips a little bit and tingles there. If you’ve had Lee Kum Kee Chiu Chow chili oil, you know exactly how spicy it is already. In the context of this broth, it’s kind of all mixed up and diluted here.

• 3/10

Overall:

Boy, it’s going to be hard to find anything that I don’t like about this. Like I alluded to earlier, I didn’t think this was going to be restaurant quality. It certainly smells right, but you can’t get that depth of an hours-long simmered soup in a bowl of instant noodles. It’s just the reality of the situation. But this is certainly closer than the Simply Food version that I reviewed a while back because that was terrible. It was a low bar. As far as instant bún bò huế, I can’t imagine anything getting closer to a restaurant than this.

There’s a solid beef flavor underneath everything. The shrimp flavor is bright and sweet, but not fishy or overwhelmingly seafood-forward. There’s a lot of great flavor from the herbs and the lemongrass in here. There’s some garlic, both from the chili crisp oil and from the broth powder, that I really appreciate. I’m struggling to find anything negative to say. Even with the price tag of $5, there’s nothing else like this on the market. So, how can I say this is too expensive when there’s literally zero competition? If I went to a Vietnamese restaurant and bought an actual bowl of Bún Bò Huế, it would cost me $15. This isn’t the same, but it’s close enough that I’m happy with it for $10 less than that.

This is innovative and delicious. This hits all the right herb and flavor notes that I would expect out of an instant bún bò huế. I’m in love with this. I didn’t think Pholicious would fumble this ball, but I had no idea it would be this fantastic. Pholicious, great job. I love it.

• 10/10

Final Thoughts

If you are any kind of fan of Pholicious’s other products or Vietnamese instant noodles in general, you owe it to yourself to try this because I am pretty certain there’s no other product like this that exists, at least not in the USA. There’s a phenomenal flavor in here. It’s got real beef in the ingredients, and it is a spectacular spice blend. I may be wrong, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything close to this in the instant noodle world. The only way to go up from here is to physically go to a restaurant and order an actual bowl of restaurant-made bún bò huế. This is so good. Normally, I would say $5 is pushing it for a bowl of instant noodles, but because there’s nothing else like this anywhere in the instant noodle realm, I really can’t be mad at the price tag. Buying this supports a business that is actually innovating the American instant noodle space, and that is extremely cool to me. This comes with the highest recommendation I can possibly give.

Continuing the Journey:

• For another Vietnamese-style beef rice-noodle soup, try Mama Phở Bò.
• For a Vietnamese-made beef phở with a lemongrass-like note, see 3 Mien Vietnamese Phở Beef Flavor.
• For another spicy shrimp soup with prominent lemongrass, check out the Mama Tom Yum Noodles Mega-Review.