Kim La won’t stop feeding me. I’m at her house for tea, hoping to learn more about Pho Cali, the downtown Sarasota restaurant where she is a co-owner and chef.

But instead, she takes me to her backyard, where she picks fresh herbs from her garden and pushes them toward my mouth. The plants are from her home country of Vietnam. “This is perilla,” she says. “You can eat it in a salad or wrap it on fish.” It tastes like bitter mint and makes the sides of my tongue tingle.

Kim snaps off the young growth from an ambarella fruit tree, another Vietnamese delicacy. “Eat! Eat!” Kim insists. The fruit is spicy and sour in a way I have never tasted before.

Since 2005, Kim and her husband Harrison, who co-owns Pho Cali with her and does all the front-of-house work, have fed most of Sarasota from their unassuming Vietnamese joint. Many people like to wax poetic about hole-in-the-wall restaurants that only locals know about. But to call Pho Cali a hole in the wall wouldn’t be right. It’s way more than that.

I’ve eaten most everything on the menu, which has remained unchanged for as long as I can remember. There are no gimmicks, no specials and the decor is charmingly patchwork. Along with framed printouts of the restaurant’s many accolades, there is a picture of Bugs Bunny as a baseball player. I have no idea why. The flowers are plastic and a menorah stands in front of the cash register all year round. The ceilings are low and the lighting is fluorescent. I believe that’s so you can better see the food. Because that is what it’s all about—the food.

There isn’t a single thing I wouldn’t recommend. I always find it stressful at unfamiliar restaurants to order the right thing. This does not happen at Pho Cali. You cannot go wrong. I am not a man who says the word “love” carelessly. I reserve it for a few select people and precious things. And I love Pho Cali. I do not hesitate to say that it is the best restaurant in all of Sarasota. In fact, when I travel to foreign countries or eat at celebrated restaurants, I often long for a dish at Pho Cali.

This is a love letter, my love letter, to Pho Cali—my favorite place to eat. 

Kim and Harrison have fed me a thousand times. They are like family. But until recently, I had only visited the outside of their house to pick up fruit trees Kim made for me from cuttings of her larger trees. To help me write this love letter, they invited me over to their home for tea. 

The tea is strong and bitter and the decor inside the couple’s home isn’t so different from that of the restaurant. There is a plastic Christmas tree full of ornaments and stockings still up above a fireplace I’m sure they have never used. “Harrison just loves Christmas,” Kim says. There is also a shrine to Buddha, a statue of Confucius and another menorah. 

Kim and Harrison met in Sarasota more than 20 years ago. They were both born in Vietnam, in the south, and later emigrated to America. Neither has returned to their homeland since. Kim came to Sarasota because her uncle lived here. Her mother said she should go to California, but she thought there were too many people there. Harrison, meanwhile, arrived stateside shortly after the war. Before coming to Sarasota, he lived and worked in Philadelphia as a civil engineer and software consultant. At the time, his brother lived in Sarasota. During a visit, his brother introduced him to Kim. They got married and settled here, even though Harrison is not a fan of the heat. 

But there was a problem: Neither of them had a job. Harrison couldn’t find work in town and all that was available to Kim was the service industry. So they decided to open their own restaurant. 

Kim’s life is food. She is the oldest sibling in her family and had to learn to take care of everyone. “I started cooking at a very young age,” she says. “And everyone liked my cooking. My neighbors or people that came into my mom’s shop would always ask to try what I made.” Her father gave her a cookbook when she was 7 years old. “He gave me this really thick book. I still have it,” she says. “I still read it sometimes if I don’t know something, but I never really needed a book to cook.”

Kim says she figures out how something is made by just tasting it. “I just try something and I know how to make it,” she says. “How can I taste a thing and know how it is made? It’s really weird to me.” 

Pho Cali’s menu is long. If you tried a new dish every day, it would take half a year to get through it all. But there are some noteworthy omissions. You’ll notice there is no green papaya salad. That’s not because Kim can’t make it, but because she can’t find ingredients that are up to her standards. “It’s not fresh,” she says. “They import from Guatemala, so by the time they get here it’s not fresh like you get from your yard. It’s not nice and crunchy.” 

The same goes for a bánh mì, the popular Vietnamese sandwich. Kim and Harrison would make a killing during lunch hours if they served it. But they won’t. That’s because they can’t find good enough bread. “Our kitchen is too small to make our own bread, and there isn’t anyone around who makes it right,” Kim says. 

It’s those high standards, plus Kim and Harrison’s passion for their craft, that set Pho Cali apart. The couple is at the restaurant six days a week, and when they go on vacation (which is only for two weeks each year) they go to other Vietnamese restaurants to try to learn how they can improve their own food. 

“I appreciate the food of other places,” Kim says. “You can tell how much they care by how they cut the meat, or how they make the sauce. I know a lot of people who cook to make money. They think, ‘Oh I want to get rich and make easy money,’ but those restaurants are not good. I don’t think about money. I won’t take shortcuts.” 

I routinely see the same people at Pho Cali. If you understand how special this place is, how could you not go at least once a week? Two of the people I frequently see there are Ian Steger and Emily Arthur, the proprietors of Project Coffee. I asked them what draws them to the restaurant. 

“They never change and they never say sorry,” Emily says. “It’s like they are impervious to the world around them. Kim and Harrison create their own world. And that’s what draws us to them and that’s what we try to do with our business.”

Ian admires what Kim and Harrison have created because they don’t follow culinary fads. “They’re not going to change based on whatever TikTok boba trends,” he says. “I love that Harrison will tell you, ‘No, you can’t have it that way because that’s not the way we do things.’”

Harrison has told me no on many occasions. When I order soup for an appetizer, he won’t let me have another soup as an entrée. “That’s too much soup,” Harrison will say, and he will suggest something else. 

“When you step into Pho Cali, you are entering a world that they created for the next 45 minutes,” Emily says. “It’s this great oasis in Sarasota. It’s authentic in one of the last ways possible.” 

Over a second cup of tea, Kim tells me she thinks about selling the restaurant. My heart drops. “I want to retire,” she says. “I cannot do this forever. It’s too much work. I’m here all day and I worry if I’m not around. What if something comes out and it’s not right? I watch every dish that comes out.” 

The couple’s daughter is about four years away from entering college and Kim thinks that’s when the couple will sell the restaurant. She promises she will teach whoever buys it to cook and will give them all her recipes, but who could replicate what she does? 

Consider the broth. I have never in my life sipped broth like I’ve had at Pho Cali. It doesn’t matter if it’s made from beef, chicken or vegetables, the first taste will make you moan. I know many people who fall ill and believe Kim’s broth is the only thing that will cure them. “There’s a technology now that makes broth base and many people buy it because it’s cheap and easy,” Kim says. “We make our soup from scratch.” It takes Kim 12 hours to make the beef broth for pho. She washes the bones, soaks them in salt for two hours and then renders them for another 10.

Kim learned her vegetable broth recipe from an old Buddhist monk. “In Vietnam, lots of people would visit the temples and give offerings of fruits and vegetables,” she says. “So the monks would have too much food and they would turn it into soup.” Her vegetable broth uses cabbage, radish, pineapple, not too much apple and lots of carrots. It is perfect.

After we finish our tea, Kim walks me around her garden. Everything that she grows is edible, and when she isn’t working, she is tending to her many fruits and vegetables. She has several types of mangos, sapodilla, papaya, sugar apples, squash and all kinds of herbal leafy greens. We stop at every plant and she picks something and tells me to put it in my mouth. 

Harrison steps outside and asks if I’m hungry and want lunch. Of course, I say yes. They prepare crispy wraps with Chinese sausage and herbs from their garden, along with several different sauces. Harrison keeps bringing me napkins while I devour four wraps. He insists that I eat more.