Not far from Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage in Fordham Heights, this Vietnamese restaurant lies in a neighborhood known for its Cambodian community, represented by a couple of very good grocery stores. Cơm Tấm Ninh Kiều excels at soups, including a half dozen options for pho. The traditional beef noodle soup is great and is of a simpler sort than most Saigon-influenced bowls are; make sure you get it with beef balls, best removed and dipped in chile sauce.

The new crop of Vietnamese restaurants to open in NYC in recent years have often taken a more modern approach to their menus. Bánh, however, skews more on the traditional side with dishes not often found in the city, whether it’s the bun cha where pork skewers and patties are grilled over charcoal or the rice cake known as banh chung. The chef, Nhu Ton, is constantly adding dishes to the menu for limited runs and those are especially worth ordering.

The name doubtlessly refers to the tiny neon bicycle in the front window of this small and charming shop. The Vietnamese food has been Westernized somewhat, to good effect. The pho features meatballs that resemble more Italian-style ones versus the compressed, pounded Southeast Asian style variety, and the banh xeo, while retaining its rice noodle wrapper, has been fried to resemble a hard-shell taco. And don’t miss the sticky-and-spicy chicken wings. Outdoor dining.

Murray Hill’s Sai Gon Dep, founded three years ago, is that rare pho parlor that specializes in pho ga, or chicken pho. This stomach-soothing soup boasts firm rice noodles and a pungent dipping sauce of chicken fat and fresh ginger. Many other Vietnamese soups are available, and don’t miss the pig ear salad.

Somewhat hidden in the shadows of elevated 7 train tracks on the Elmhurst-Jackson Heights border, Thai Son was once part of a chain that had many prominent branches. Now this is one of two remaining (the other in Manhattan’s Chinatown). It constitutes a very agreeable Vietnamese hash house, specializing in the rice dishes favored in the Mekong Delta, plus the usual spring and summer rolls, pho and banh mi, as well as some unexpected entrees, such as frog legs in French butter.

Founded in 2011, JoJu extends the frontiers of the classic banh mi sandwich, constructing some newfangled ones out of things like Korean bulgogi and Japanese pork belly, while retaining the usual Vietnamese varieties. All may be customized with a fried egg, and made especially spicy by the addition of both green and red hot sauces. An unusual offering is banh mi fries heaped with pickled vegetables, herbs, and sauces. There’s a Manhattan location, too.

This banh mi and bubble tea parlor in an obscure corner of Elmhurst south of Queens Boulevard sells some of the best Vietnamese sandwiches, with a signature version featuring pork, bacon, and a fried egg. Another attraction is a customizable soup (called “spicy hot noodle soup,” even though it’s not particularly spicy) something like bun bo Hue that allows one to choose two ingredients to be added from a varied list that includes fish balls, clams, duck feet, pig skin, fatty beef, and squid.

Sao Mai is the East Village’s Vietnamese standby that’s laid-back and inexpensive. It offers a full menu of standards that are consistently better than they need to be, including a papaya salad rife with fresh herbs, lemongrass chicken over rice, caramel clay-pot pork, and luxurious bun platters served with brittle rice paper wrappers that must be dipped in warm water before use.

When Madame Vo popped up in 2017, it paid homage to homestyle Vietnamese dishes. Diners would pass a Vietnamese cyclo (pedicab) from the front window, and the menu seemed more devoted to Saigon than the currently faddish Hanoi-style dishes that keep appearing on menus. That meant pho in several permutations, with heaping plates of herbs and sprouts, as well as fish sauce-glazed chicken, salted crab, and a particularly lush rendition of Vietnamese fried rice.

This Jersey City restaurant, located near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, provides three elegant dining rooms, a full bar, and a voluminous menu that’s only slightly more expensive than the usual Vietnamese café. The pho is top notch, and a bowl seems to be on every table at lunchtime. But maybe go for some of the other dishes, including the legendary “shaking beef” (bo luc lac), a lemongrass saute of squid or chicken, a fried whole flounder, or clams steamed in beer. Seafood is a strong point.

This breezy greeting is Greenwich Village’s neighborhood Viet restaurant, intent on attracting locals by offering comfortable surroundings and good food. And not just with its pho and banh mi — try hot-and-sour canh chua; or the clay-pot chicken bobbing with quail eggs; or the bun thit heo nuong, an omnibus bowl of rice noodles, grilled pork chops, shrimp crackers, and crisp spring rolls littered with crushed peanuts and fresh chiles.

Van Da is a small cafe that describes its purview as “modern Vietnamese cuisine.” What that means is delicate small plates like steamed rice cakes topped with minced shrimp, in addition to bigger snacks that include a short-rib grilled cheese served with a cup of pho broth, for dipping. Then there are noodles, salads, dumplings, and mains that run to turmeric skate and roasted duck with egg noodles. There are lots of of modern flourishes on an eclectic menu.

Moving into the old Mission Cantina corner spot on the Lower East Side, Saigon Social set tongues wagging with its fried chicken sandwich, which layered an outsize crisp cutlet with shredded pickles and vinegary red hot sauce in banh mi fashion. But even more impressive were its garlic noodles, which layered a shifting roster of flavorful main ingredients over the glistening noodles. The usual pho and other classic Viet dishes take a back seat.

Decorated with contemporary Vietnamese building materials, including perforated concrete blocks and decorative metal screens, Bolero is named after a dance craze popular in Vietnam when chef and PhD pharmacologist Matt Le-Khac was a kid. The menu runs to elegant versions of Vietnamese regional standards — a bun bo Hue that substitutes mushrooms for meat, for example, and a crab-pomelo salad. There’s a choice of fish sauces, and the backyard tea garden is one of the better outdoor spaces in Williamsburg.

This sentimental favorite just off Chrystie Street boasts a menu that, in an old-fashioned way, lists 20 variations of pho based mainly on the beef combos thrown therein. The over-rice dishes called com dia are also a high point, and so is beef with lemongrass, shrimp paste on a sugar cane, chicken curry served with a baguette, and anything featuring grilled beef or pork.

Formerly located on Metropolitan Avenue in Ridgewood, Bunker moved across the border into Bushwick into much bigger, flashier premises, tricked out to look like a hawker market. The menu uses premium ingredients to turn out the banh xeo (a Vietnamese-style crepe filled with heritage pork), papaya salad (dotted with beef jerky), banh mi (including grilled bacon), and spring rolls. Vegetarian options abound, and a full bar is available.

Fruit importer Patrick Lin met Ly Nguyen while he was in Vietnam, and the rest is history: from how they opened a soup-and-sandwich shop in Bensonhurst, where the specialty was the Cambodian-Vietnamese potage hu tieu, then expanded the concept into a full-blown modern bistro in Dumbo. There, they invented a riff on the banh mi featuring an elongated hamburger patty, and a recipe for mussels in a lemongrass-scented broth, along with a brothless version of their original hit soup, hu tieu.

This neighborhood spot in Bushwick pays special attention to vegetarian versions of Vietnamese dishes, and the pho comes with a choice of beef or meatless broths. Another quirk is that smoked brisket is put in the beef pho, blurring the line between barbecue and Viet cuisine. Banh mi are also offered on a very short menu, obviating the need for difficult choices. The place shone in Eater’s pho tour of the city. It has a Williamsburg branch, too.

Vietnam has a big coffee culture, so it comes as no surprise that a Vietnamese coffee shop has appeared in Bushwick that sells American and Vietnamese versions of the caffeinated beverage. Nha Minh is located in the front of music club Trans-Pecos, and also sells banh mi, rice-noodle bun, and breakfast rice bowls; many are vegetarian and inspired by Central Vietnamese Buddhist Vietnamese cooking, via chef and owner Fred Hua.

A gem on the border of Prospect Heights, Banh Mi Place doesn’t look like much, but it has one of the best menus of the Vietnamese sandwiches in Brooklyn. Not only does it proffer the classic meat, poultry, and seafood versions, it goes one step beyond to use meat substitutes. This sounds like an inherently bad idea, but the mock meats work perfectly here, maybe even better than the original products. Bun salads, pho, and com dia (over-rice dishes) round out the menu.

This classic Vietnamese sandwich shop on the northern verge of Sunset Park’s Chinatown is nearly as old as Banh Mi Saigon, and it constitutes a local hangout for the Vietnamese population, who sit drinking tea and feasting on snacks from the cases that line the walls. The hilltop park from which the neighborhood gets its name is nearby, so why not carry out and have a picnic?

The most agreeable Vietnamese cafe in the city makes you feel like you’re sitting in someone’s kitchen. Sure, you can a great banh mi or bowl of pho, but a favorite has long been banh xeo, a perfect rice-batter crepe that cooks up crisp and yellow, furnished with herbs and lettuces for wrapping bites, and the usual nuoc cham (the fish sauce-based condiment). Thanh Da has an offshoot at 56th Street and 8th Avenue, also in Sunset Park, that mainly peddles banh mi.

Named after a Ho Chi Minh City market, this tiny cafe in Bath Beach offers a smaller menu than most places, to its credit. The dish everyone raves about (it’s on every table), tom hoa tien are whole shrimp wrapped in paper-thin pastry with crabmeat. Soups are another strong point, from the pho to bun bo Hue to sup mang cua (made with crabmeat and bamboo) to canh chua ga (a sweet-and-sour chicken soup with tomato wedges). 

What could be better than a razor-thin, flame-grilled pair of pork chops tossed atop broken rice and garnished with tomatoes and cucumbers? Pour on the nuoc cham (the sweet and vinegary fish sauce). Located just over the light-rail tracks in the ancient Dutch town of New Dorp, Pho Rainbow does the over-rice dishes called com tam best, but also turns out a great beef-ball pho.