Every Friday, these men serve a warm bowl of cultural heritage at PeaceHealth

By noon on any given Friday, a long line of mostly health care workers in their monochromatic scrubs forms inside PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center as kitchen staff serve up warm bowls of broth and noodles topped with a choice of protein: lean eye of round roast beef, chicken or tofu.

PeaceHealth Executive Chef Andy Nguyen and head cook Khanh Trinh dish out more than 2,000 meals a day to caregivers, patients and community members. And, at the end of nearly every week, they share their heritage with Pho Fridays.

Nguyen doesn’t start such days with a cup of coffee. Instead, he goes for a steaming mug of pho broth prepared by Trinh, his longtime family friend.

Nguyen and Trinh’s parents immigrated to the U.S. after the Vietnam War, in which their fathers both fought for the south. Nguyen’s parents were among the more than 50,000 refugees who landed in California’s Camp Pendleton in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1990 that he was born at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center.

Trinh arrived with his parents in 1991 when he was 20; his father had been imprisoned in North Vietnam for more than five years before they could migrate to the U.S. Trinh found work as a dishwasher at St. Joseph before eventually becoming a cook.

Trinh has now been preparing pho at St. Joseph for more than 20 years.

With a rich, savory bone broth and rice noodles at its core, pho is synonymous with Vietnamese cuisine. It is the dish of the nation, as well as its post-war diaspora. And, arguably no two families make the dish the same way.

“It’s like chicken noodle soup, right?” Nguyen said one Friday morning. “Everyone has their adaptations.”

In the north, where the dish is thought to have originated, pho broth is lighter and subtly spiced. The flat, wide noodles are served with minimal garnishes, often just green onions. American connoisseurs are more familiar with the sweeter, richer broth of southern pho, accompanied by what feels like an entire garden’s worth of fresh herbs.

“Roasting the aromatics before adding them to simmer overnight really adds a deep flavor that you can’t replicate if you skip,” said Trinh, who started his career helping his grandfather run a noodle shop in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. What is served at PeaceHealth is the result of years of tweaking that family recipe and adjusting it to an American palate.

After roasting the beef and chicken bones to give the broth an especially rich flavor, Trinh boils them for up to an hour, removing impurities. Then the entire 80-quart pot of broth is dumped out. 

The real flavor from the bones, the heart of the pho, isn’t in that water, Nguyen said. Instead, it is slowly drawn out of the bones as they cook for 10 hours on low heat along with raw ginger, roasted onion and cinnamon sticks.

“The overnight game is really just extracting all that goodness from the bones, that true beef broth,” Nguyen said.

In the morning, Trinh adds additional spices, including black peppercorns, cloves, fennel seeds, coriander seeds and star anise. While pho often has lots of MSG and fish sauce, neither is added to the dish at PeaceHealth.

“We don’t use in here,” Trinh said, explaining that the dish is prepared in a way to exclude as many potential allergens as possible. 

“We need to take care” of patients, families and PeaceHealth caregivers, he added.

After choosing their protein, pho fans work their way down a long self-serve station with stainless steel containers full of basil, lime edges, cilantro, green onions, red onion, mint, bean sprouts, mixed greens and sliced jalapeño peppers. At the far end are the condiments: hoisin sauce, sesame oil, sriracha, fish sauce and lime juice.

“I kind of call it like the subway of soup, right?,” Nguyen joked. “Like you get to just make your own.”

The team serves about 250 bowls of pho on Fridays.

“We literally have one pot. We can’t make any more,” Nguyen explained. 

Only having one pot also meant that when it broke — apparently pots can break — in October 2023, there was no pho. For more than seven months, hospital employees who’d become accustomed to Pho Friday went without.

Among those employees was per diem nurse Alanna Steele, who works in labor and delivery. Holding a warm bowl of pho, she smiled as she explained that she specifically picks up shifts on Fridays because of the pho.

Trinh is quick to point out that hygiene and safety are paramount when cooking at the hospital because not only do the sick need nutritious meals, but it’s also necessary to keep doctors and other caregivers healthy.

“You see a lot of healing broths, or sipping broths these days, and it truly helps,” Nguyen said. “When a patient is on a liquid diet, sometimes all they can have is broth, so when we can enhance the flavor and pack it with nutrients, it’s a win-win.”

Bone broth is loaded with protein and collagen. If cooled, the collagen from the bones, which gives it a deep umami flavor, causes the broth to thicken like honey, Trinh explained.

“Our parents always want us to be like doctors and lawyers,” Nguyen said. “But I’m like, ‘I am a doctor. I’m a doctor with food.’”

A previous version of this story misstated the location of Camp Pendleton.  This story was updated at 10:04 a.m. Aug. 25, 2025. Cascadia Daily News regrets the error.

Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at [email protected]; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.