The Daly City pho shop run by a 19-year-old after her father died

It is 4:32 in the morning on a Friday in March when Anh Nguyen lights the burners under the broth pot. She is 19 years old. The pot holds eighteen gallons. She has been doing this alone since December.

Pho Anh has been on Mission Street in Daly City since 2003. Her father bought the restaurant from a man who was retiring. He was 31 then. He named the restaurant after his daughter before she was born.

The bones are beef knuckle and oxtail, picked up Monday from a butcher in San Bruno who has supplied them for 22 years. The aromatics are charred onion, ginger held in a flame for two minutes a side, star anise, cardamom, cloves, fennel seed. Plus one ingredient her father called the trick. Anh will not say what it is. Her father told her on a Tuesday in October when he could no longer stand at the stove. He wrote the name down on a napkin. She memorized it and burned the napkin.

The diagnosis came on September 18. Stage IV pancreatic cancer. Anh was three weeks into her sophomore year at SF State. She came home that night and her father met her at the door and said, before she had taken off her jacket, that he would teach her everything he had not yet taught her, starting tomorrow. He died eleven weeks later, on December 4. The funeral was on December 6. Anh opened the restaurant on December 8 for breakfast. She had not told anyone she was going to.

Her mother runs the front. Her name is Linh. She is 51 and was a hairdresser for sixteen years before she took over the dining room. She did not know how to use the point-of-sale system. She does now.

Her uncle came up from Westminster in mid-December and stayed three months. His name is Vinh. He had been a pho cook in a strip-mall restaurant on Bolsa for twenty years. He drove up in his daughter’s minivan with a cooler of preserved lemons and his own knives. He slept on the couch in the back office. He went home in March.

“He told me the second week, he said: I cannot teach you to taste. Your father already did that. I can teach you to manage twelve orders at once. That is something else.” She has been running the kitchen alone for ten weeks now.

The broth simmers for nine hours. The first bowls go out at 7 a.m. By 7:30 the line is six deep. The Friday morning regulars are mostly older Vietnamese men who knew her father. They order without speaking. She knows what they want.

Mr. Trinh has been coming every Friday for fifteen years. He is 73. He used to come with Anh’s father on Fridays after the morning rush, sit at the back booth, drink coffee, and argue about the Giants. The first Friday Anh opened without her father, Mr. Trinh came in at 7:14 a.m. He looked at Anh, put his hand on his heart, nodded once. He ordered what he always orders, tai nam gáu, the rare brisket and flank with fatty shank. He sat at the back booth alone. He left a twenty on a fourteen-dollar bowl. He has been there every Friday since.

“I do not cry at work,” Anh says. “I cry in the car, going home. Sometimes I cry on Sunday afternoons. I do not cry here. He would not have wanted me to cry into the broth.”

On the wall behind the cash register is a small framed photo of her father, taken in 2018, wearing a Giants cap and laughing at something off-camera. Anh’s mother put it there in January. Anh kisses her fingers and touches the glass on her way into the kitchen each morning. She does not think about it. It is a routine her body decided.

Her boyfriend, Eddie, comes for lunch on Thursdays. He is 20, studying business at City College. He brings her a coffee from the cafe two blocks down. He pays for his own pho. He sits at the counter so she can see him from the kitchen window. He does not stay long. He has noticed that the regulars notice him, and Anh has noticed that he has noticed.

The block is mostly Vietnamese and Filipino. The dry cleaner across the street has been there for thirty years. The bakery two doors down opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 1 p.m. Anh waves to the bakers when she takes the trash out at 6:15. They wave back with floured hands.

She is taking one class this semester. Linguistics. It meets Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6 p.m. She drives from Daly City to SF State after the lunch shift. She has not missed a class. Her professor knows.

After the breakfast rush, around 10:30 a.m., she sits down at the back booth with a plain bowl of broth and a soup spoon. She does this every morning. She tastes it. She closes her eyes. Some days she nods. Some days she gets up to add something she will not name. The broth was right both days.

On the Friday I visited, she finished her tasting bowl and stood up and walked to the front to refill Mr. Trinh’s tea. He nodded. She nodded. Neither of them spoke. Then she went back to the kitchen, where the second batch of bones had been roasting since 9 a.m. and was just starting to char.