Why You Will Find Fake Dog At Your Local Pho Shop

I've eaten the dish at two separate restaurants now, and both times I placed my order, the servers had to stifle laughter while scrawling it on their notepads. It's really strange how similar the reactions were—almost like they were in on the same joke. In a way, they were. I guess it's hard not to have a sense of humor when serving up gia cay, or, literally translated, "fake dog."'

In Westminster, California—a neighborhood in Orange County that is the home of the largest Vietnamese-American population outside of Vietnam—one of the oldest restaurants in the neighborhood has this fake dog meat soup on the menu. So I did what any other food-obsessed Millennial would do and drove an hour to try it. The spot is called Vien Dong, and their gia cay had chunks of simmered pork leg served in a cloudy, almost tonkotsu-like broth, thickened from all the collagen that's leached out of the trotters. There's no basil, mint, or cilantro like with pho or Bún bò Huế to lighten the dish's intensity—not that you'd want that fermented, umami flavor to be diluted anyways—just a generous handful of thinly sliced scallions.

But one fake dog soup wasn't enough for me, so I sought a version in the San Gabriel Valley—a part of Los Angeles that has been recently nicknamed "the new Chinatown" because of the glut of regional Asian food there. I ended up at Pho Ga Bac-Ninh in Rosemead, and they served theirs in a clear broth, with more of that spicy, gingery galangal flavor near the forefront. Instead of scallions, it's topped with a blanket of stinky rau om, also known as rice paddy herb. Despite the subtle differences, at both restaurants, it was fatty, salty, ferment-y, and damned delicious.

Yet at both restaurants, when I asked if the dish was popular, the servers shook their heads no. One of them actually thought I'd made a mistake, and insisted that I meant to order the beef pho.

This notorious dish, which is commonly listed as bun gia cay or thit gia cay on Vietnamese menus, is made up of pig's feet—sometimes a whole pig leg—simmered with galangal, fermented rice, shrimp paste, and turmeric, and generally served alongside rice noodles. Since it's a dish meant to mimic another dish, recipes and techniques vary on a household-by-household basis.

I'm by no means a Vietnamese food expert—my only credentials are that I lived smack in the middle of Little Saigon during high school. But this soup really piqued my curiosity. How did it get left out of the pho/banh mi/spring roll Vietnamese food canon? I decided to ask some experts on the subject.

According to Nguyen Tran from Starry Kitchen, an underground supper club in Los Angeles known for their Vietnamese fusion dishes, there's a simple reason I'd never seen it: Vietnamese immigration patterns. He tells me, "You know how most Korean cuisine you find is mostly South Korean and not North Korean? Well, that applies to Vietnamese food too. Residents from South Vietnam fled and they brought the foods and cravings of their provinces—including pho, banh mis, and spring rolls."

Andrea Nguyen, author of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen and The Banh Mi Handbook, said her mom would start out by wrapping a pig leg in newspaper, then char it in the fireplace to replicate the technique used to singe off dog fur. She also said it's one of her favorite dishes.

"Pho is actually a Northern Vietnamese dish too, but once it went down to the south, it became popularized," Andrea Nguyen said. "It took on the southern Vietnamese twist, which means it got a little bit sweeter and started being served in larger portions."

Andrea also mentioned that southern Vietnamese flavors tend to be more complex and layered than the pure, one-note flavors of the North. Northern pho, for example, is less about the mint and hoisin and star anise, and all about that how-beefy-can-you-get-it stock. Gia cay kept its hardcore Northern flavor profile and refused to adapt.

According to both Andrea and Nguyen, the tensions arising from the north/south, communist/capitalist dichotomy are still felt in Vietnamese-American communities today. Anyone who's making Northern food—especially a dish as saliently non-Western as gia cay—is cooking with a target on their back.

"If someone wants to go after another person, and they find out they're associated with an old party member, or even a member of the current Vietnamese government, that becomes a reason to try and ruin their business'" Andrea said. "Having any ties to Northern culture is pretty much a basis for defamation."

Knowing what I know now, it's completely reasonable that no one at either restaurant wanted to talk to the dude who walked in, sat alone, ordered the fake dog, took pictures of the menu, and started asking questions. Shit, I wouldn't have talked to me. I wouldn't have served me, and if I did, I would've jumped me in an alley after I paid.

Since I looked like, at best, some asshole ethno-tourist who was about to caption his Instagram photo: "Look at this super weird thing I ate!", and, at worst, a narc, I left without a real sense of how the dish is made.

I hit up Andrea Nguyen for a recipe so I recreate it myself. I wanted to know what combinations of techniques and flavors were used to transform assorted pig parts into a veritable dog-imitator.

And, to be clear, my curiosity isn't the end result of some overwrought understand-culture-one-bite-at-a-time Travel Channel cliché. Food doesn't always have to be a metaphor; a dish can be interesting, tasty, and worthy of exploration without it being transcendent.

Andrea did me one better and sent over her mom's version—the OG gia cay that she used to eat as a kid and still requests whenever she goes home. It says something when a person who has written four cookbooks trusts her mom's recipe more than her own.

The recipe starts with the hair on pork foreleg called a picnic roast, and when I told my butcher what the project was, he hooked it up with some pigs' feet on the house. The first step was to burn the pork in hay, which mimics the smoky flavor that's imparted into dog meat when its hair is burned off pre-stewing.

Lighting a hay fire on a tiny fourth-floor apartment balcony in West LA isn't the easiest thing to do, but I made it happen with a gutted charcoal grill and a pair of disabled fire alarms.

After charring the pork and rinsing off the hay residue, I broke it down into one-inch by one-inch cubes and started building the base of the soup. Since carnivores and omnivores—like dogs—tend to have a gamey, almost irony twang to them, the recipe alters the taste of corn-fed pork using multiple fermented, funky ingredients. I've never tasted dog meat but I can't say that I wouldn't try it if presented with an opportunity to. Andrea tells me that she hasn't either, but her parents would eat it all the time when they could afford it (it is apparently a luxury), and that it was indeed a tasty protein.

Andrea's mom's recipe calls for pureed onion, fish sauce, galangal, turmeric, a fermented shrimp paste called mam tom, and sour cream, which mimics a fermented Vietnamese rice condiment called me.

After simmering the pork in water for half an hour and then incorporating it into the sauce at a rolling boil, it's starting to look and smell like the restaurant versions of gia cay that I had.

In the end, it wasn't quite as gelatinous and umami-filled as Vien Dong's, or as aromatic and brothy as Pho Ga Dac Biet's. It almost straddled the line between the two. Like Andrea said, the dish varies household-by-household, but, no matter how you spin it, I almost ate the whole damn thing—over the week—by myself because it was so good.

I wish I could say this soup was the next big trend that Anthony Bourdain would wax rhapsodically about while slamming double shots of rice liquor on the next season of Parts Unknown. Or at the very least, that this would join the Vietnamese food canon and get appropriated by food trucks across America selling it in Styrofoam bowls for $12 a pop. But, in all likelihood, that won't happen; it's just too funky. The mainstream palate isn't clamoring for non pho and bánh mí offerings, and northern Vietnam's political history—whether fair or not—still mars its cuisine.

Regardless of how tasty they are, not all dishes get a happy, commercialized ending. But hey, the Mexican tripe soup menudo made it big in California, despite all of the narco-violence happening in the country, so you never know.