Châu Bella

REVIEW: Café Châu

by Adam Erace

UNLESS YOU'RE IN the market for fresh-kill chickens or pirated DVDs, it's unlikely you'll find yourself on the 2200 block of South Seventh Street. Around the corner from the Preah Buddha Rangsey Temple, this is the heart of deep South Philly's Cambodian community, and outsiders rarely venture into its narrow shops. Sucks for them. Behind humble storefronts like Café Châu's, very little cash gets you food that's truly money.

Inside the 20-seat cafe, 24-year-old Brian Truong takes orders. His parents, Chau and Banh, natives of the former Saigon, opened this pho parlor two years ago, and the Von Dutch-capped college grad works here most days, running food, building banh mi, mixing up Juicy Fruit-y jackfruit shakes, fragrant lotus root tea and Earth's baddest lemonade (salt is the secret) behind a beat-up cold case.

Chau Truong is responsible for the cafe's bewitching cooking. Slight of stature and sweet as Vietnamese coffee — her dark, creamy version deploys three kinds of Viennese beans — she's a tripe charmer in a junior-size sweatsuit, and I don't know where her house-special beef pho has been all my life. The vermicelli-stacked soup brought beef five ways: steak, balls, tripe, tendon and an almost consomme-like stock borne of bone and star anise. Each slurp resounded with meaty clarity, nudged in spicy, sour or herbaceous direction by my tableside additions of sawtooth culantro, licorice-y Thai basil, sliced jalapeños, hoisin and chili sauces and big squirts of fresh lime.

This is not white-boy pho, and the more you appreciate authenticity in the forms of gelled pig's blood and pork knuckle — the wish-it-were-spicier bun bo hue counts both among its flotsam, the latter looking like a spiny caterpillar and tasting of lemon grass — the more you'll appreciate Café Châu.

Less intrepid (but still just as good) choices include sweet pork spring rolls in buttery, phyllo-brittle wrappers and pounded-thin, honey-marinated grilled pork chops with com tam and daikon cut to look like flowers. But why not try the intense, sweet, shell- and roe-darkened crab noodle soup filled with spongy tofu, tender pork balls, vermicelli and piney Vietnamese cilantro? There's cubed blood in this bowl, too, enough to make Carrie blush. Push it aside if you must — the staff's so nice at Café Châu, they're not all gonna laugh at you.

(adam.erace@citypaper.net)

Café Châu | 2201 S. Seventh St., 215-463-1095, cafechau.com. Open Tue.-Sun., 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Appetizers, $2.50-$3.50; banh mi, $3-$4; soups, $6-$7; rice and noodle dishes, $5.50-$7.