Founder-owner of Brass Spoon Sebastien Vong details what goes into his Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand-winning bowl of pho in the city.
Chinese by blood and with a quarter of Vietnamese heritage, Sebastien Vong came to learn the craft of how to make great Vietnamese food during his youth in Paris.
The founder-owner of Hong Kong’s most well-known pho brand Brass Spoon was born in the capital and took after his maternal Saigonese grandmother to replicate her recipes for beef noodle soup.
“I came to Hong Kong when I was 25 years old and, like many people in the banking industry here, I opened up a restaurant,” Sebastien recalls. Gone from toiling away in a bank, he ventured into the restaurant business to answer Hong Kong’s begging question for where good pho could be enjoyed in the city. “There was no good premium pho here in the early 2010s.”
Without any formal restaurant training, he opened Brass Spoon’s first location in Wan Chai’s Star Street district in October 2015. Two years later, he received his first Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand award and has retained a place on the Guide ever since.
What makes Brass Spoon’s pho, rich in umami notes and attracting large lines pouring out of his restaurants, true Michelin Guide quality? “Good broth and good noodles!”
“There is no secret to our pho. I have many people asking me to share with them the recipe or the secret to our great broth. It’s all on YouTube! You could watch all the recipe videos and be able to create your own pho, but can you make 500 bowls every day and keep it consistent?”
Sebastien’s ‘secret’ to pho is cooking a beef bone broth made specifically with shin bones, imported from the US to Hong Kong, for 24 hours to ensure his signature meaty touch to the soup.
The noodles used within Brass Spoon’s great quality pho bowls come in the form of using Vietnamese rice noodles that are less starchy as their Chinese counterparts and retain a springiness when submerged in broth.
With the noodles being hard to source, where Sebastien notably works with two factories in France and the US, and beef shin hard to import to Hong Kong, the rarity of his bowl of pho has earned Brass Spoon a near-decade of popularity.
In the midst of an economic flux within Hong Kong’s restaurant scene, Sebastien finds that pricing his pho around the HKD100 mark, as compared to fine-casual meals costing upwards of HKD400 and fine-dining pushing HKD1,000, has allowed him to buoy the spending pressures Hong Kongers have faced when dining out.
“People are not so price conscious for a bowl of pho as they would be for a fancy meal out.”
Brass Spoon has formerly operated on Central’s Pottinger Street and Sha Tin’s New Town Plaza mall before stifled rent negotiations led Sebastien to close the two restaurants and reassess his business strategy. He also previously held a branch in Quarry Bay.
The closure of his first mall restaurant in Sha Tin inadvertently led to the opening of his newly appointed space inside MTR’s THE SOUTHSIDE mall in Wong Chuk Hang. Sebastien was charmed by the appeal to join the mall as an anchor restaurant, creating a testing ground for a new identity of his pho brand nine years later after founding: banh mi.
“From the beginning in 2015, I wanted to create a banh mi and pho restaurant because those were two things that Hong Kong didn’t have at the time. 10 years ago, finding a French baguette in Hong Kong was impossible and no one wanted to create one with an airy texture and thin crust that a banh mi sandwich requires.”
Launching in November last year, Sebastien introduced a classic grilled pork banh mi to Brass Spoon in Wong Chuk Hang, inspired by Hoi An’s famed Bánh Mì Phượng and Madam Khanh – The Banh Mi Queen stores. They were Anthony Bourdain’s favourites in the Vietnamese city.
The popularity of pho first grew in Sebastien’s homeland during a 1970s immigration wave of Vietnamese and Indonesian refugees stunted by the end of the Indo-China war. The soup recipe became a fixture to Paris’ Chinatown and later across the entire city.
The recipe found itself embedded deep within a Western foodie public consciousness with the promotion of Vietnamese culture during the 2000s and 2010s from Bourdain’s travels to the country. “When you have pho for the first time and you really like it, you always try to find the recipe.”
“Hong Kong does not have a huge demand for pho as Vietnamese food is not a cuisine that people really dine out for a lot.” Sebastien is interested in educating Hong Kongers about how pho is made to draw a comparison to the luxe factor and value-worth of its main competitor ramen.
Sebastien envisioned an international future for Brass Spoon pre-pandemic. Today, with two stores under his belt, the founder wants to continue a mission to answer a question for where good pho – and now banh mi – can be had in Hong Kong.
Visit Brass Spoon in Central and Wong Chuk Hang today and try their city-famous pho.
