Vibrant Vietnamese is handled with care at Stock
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Ten a.m. in Saigon, a hundred degrees. Tyler Akin was about to dip into something just as steamy — his first bowl of pho.
He was backpacking through Southeast Asia with his childhood best friend, crisscrossing Vietnam on a motorcycle with an old Army map from his dad, a former lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne, as his guide. Pho beckoned.
“I never thought I could eat something hot in that environment and love it so much,” Akin remembers. “I went into Vietnam with very little knowledge and came out completely obsessed.”
The experience proved seminal for the budding chef, who’d go on to cook in D.C. and later at Zahav. In June, Akin and his wife, Nicole Reigle, opened Stock, a sleek soup stoop, in Fishtown.
On the surface, everything about Stock is spare and elegantly efficient. The name troubles you for only a single syllable, and the seven-item menu is less a menu than a postcard. The kitchen is less a kitchen than a prep station — with no hood system, without gas, Akin cooks everything on induction burners. The lines are clean, the angles sharp. Fifty shades of gray course through spotless tiles, and the woodwork gleams. The neutral stage is all the better contrast for Akin’s vivid food. The slashes of green are greener in a chiffonade of lime basil crisscrossing raw cobia and black plums. The pickled pink cabbage is pinker, threaded through a pork sausage banh mi like neon wiring. Everything stands out, both visually and flavor-wise. The attention to detail and chef-y upgrades (Creekstone beef, an Asian herb patch at Tom Culton’s farm, spices by epicier Lior Lev Sercarz) give the menu a look we haven’t seen in Philly before.
In that regard, Stock immediately reminded me of Little Serow, Johnny Monis’ tasting-menu Thai bunker in D.C. Akin used to cook there, I was surprised to learn during our interview. I wondered: Was he in the kitchen two years ago, the night I ate one of the most memorable meals of my life — and left Little Serow jealous as hell? Why couldn’t we have something like this in Philly? I whined. Now, in Stock, we do.
“I knew I wanted to do Southeast Asian without a doubt, Little Serow totally reinforced that for me,” Akin says. “I’m really skeptical of places that have huge menus, so we wanted to limit ourselves and focus on doing a few things as well as we could. We had the opportunity to expand the kitchen by introducing a hood, but I knew if we were going down that road we would lose our focus.”
I get that, but Stock’s food is so compelling, so vibrant, it’s hard not to want more. Currently, there are two salads, a fish and a meat starter, two phos and a plate of glistening salt-dusted papaya for dessert, which sucks for people like me who think that particular fruit tastes like feet. I’d take the same exact prep — lime juice, palm sugar, Thai basil — with mango or pineapple with pleasure.
But to start at the beginning, the green mango salad set the tone for the powerful, thrilling flavors in which Akin deals. The setup is similar to som tum, but instead of unripe papaya, he uses the crunchy shaved mango for its “inherent acidity.” That tang — assertive, but subtly floral — anchored the dish, with peanuts, chilies, fried shallots, lime, sugar, fish sauce and rau ram (aka Vietnamese coriander) introducing the important pops of salty, sweet, spicy and bitter.
Cool coconut milk, lip-puckering tamarind and candy-like lychee harmonized in a dressing that coated the second salad, a thicket of watercress deriving its heat not from chilies, but from ginger and raw red onion. The cobia crudo was furnished with cucumber water, holy basil, pickled asparagus and red peppercorns from Phu Quoc Island. Crushed, they stood out like freckles on the ivory fish.
Then there’s the pho. Creekstone bones are the foundation of Akin’s beef soup, releasing their essence and gelatin over a 24-hour simmer. Onions and ginger, both thoroughly charred, enter the broth at the 14-hour mark. Spices meet them 18 hours in. “I’m not wild about pho that is super aromatic,” he tells me, so he leaves out cloves and balances the star anise and Saigon cinnamon with herbal Indian green coriander and funky Thai long pepper to create a broth that doesn’t smell like a Christmas candle.
When the stock cools and separates, Akin scrapes off the beef fat — “I think it has a dirty quality” — and introduces chicken fat to create pho’s critical unctuousness, a secret that’s practiced by a rogue sect of street chefs in Vietnam.
Ladled over a nest of noodles and rosettes of flank, brisket and tendon or cheek, the broth possessed such clarity. Its beef flavor envelops you first, the spices second and subtle. The requisite accessory plate includes bean sprouts, lime wedges and corsages of herbs, including mint, “encountered everywhere in Vietnam, but not seen a lot here.”
My biggest gripe was the amount of beef in my bowl, only a slice or two of each after Akin had already upped the portion after the first couple weeks. He wants to keep costs down. “Some people who are used to paying $7 for a bowl of pho balk at $9.” There’s a name for them: cheapskates.
I would gladly drop $15 for a beefed-up bowl, and $9 is not unfair for the beautifully earthy vegan version brewed with dried shiitake and maitake mushrooms. Anyone complaining about Stock’s prices needs mental help; you can order the whole menu for less than $60. That might surpass the average check at Pho 75 or Pho Ha, but in care and quality, the competition is nada.
STOCK | 308 E. Girard Ave., stockphilly.com. Mon. and Thu.-Fri., 5:30-10:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., noon-8 p.m. Plates, $7-$9, desserts, $4.
