SF’s Most Legendary Chicken Phở Is Now Available Until 3 a.m.

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

We’d made the mistake of coming to the Marina District at 10 o’clock on a Friday night, and on Super Bowl weekend, no less. The intersection of Fillmore and Greenwich was even more chaotic than usual — both sides of the street swarming with half-drunk twentysomething frat-boy and sorority-girl types traveling in packs of six or eight. Everyone was decked out in their tightest skirts and bro-iest muscle shirts to stand in line outside Balboa Cafe or any of the half-dozen other bars that flank the block.

That’s the Marina in a nutshell. Depending on your point of view, it’s either the best or most obnoxious neighborhood in San Francisco.

Maybe it goes without saying that our dowdy, middle-aged party did not trek to this corner of the Marina for espresso martinis or a night of sweaty, awkward flirtation. Instead, we’d come in search of much unlikelier treasure: the most wholesome bowl of chicken phở in the city.

That’s what we were hoping for, anyway, when we heard that Turtle Tower had opened a brand new location on Fillmore — and, just as exciting, that it was dishing out hot phở until 3 a.m. on weekends.

If you’re a serious phở slurper in San Francisco, you’re likely aware of Turtle Tower’s rise and fall and, now, rise again. Probably the most famous and widely beloved phở restaurant in San Francisco during its 25-year run, Turtle Tower operated four locations across the city at its peak. Regulars were understandably devastated, then, when the last location shut its doors in 2023 — and overjoyed when a new ownership group revived the business with a sleek, well-appointed restaurant in the Financial District last spring. Then came the surprise news that Turtle Tower 2.0’s second location would be in the Marina, of all places.

Open for about a month now, the new Fillmore Street restaurant has the look and feel of a swanky fusion restaurant, with low-pulsing electronic dance music and an abundance of stylishly backlit tropical greenery. A chic black-and-gold mural of what appears to be the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long spans the back wall. All in all, it’s quite a makeover from the stripped-down, mom-and-pop vibe of the original Larkin Street restaurant, where I used to go for big weekend lunches with my family in the early aughts.

The worry, of course, with the opening of a “fancier” Turtle Tower in a non-Asian neighborhood, is that the food is going to get whitewashed and watered down. Indeed, the first thing we noticed is that the menu didn’t list the “deluxe” version of the restaurant’s famous chicken phở (listed as “phở gà lòng” in the old days), which came with giblets and skin for a boost of texture and earthy oomph. When we asked our server about it, she smiled sheepishly and explained that, at least for now, they weren’t offering that version. “We weren’t sure if ‘Marina people’ would eat giblets,” she said. Which is, well, fair enough. (She noted, though, that a lot of Asian customers had been asking for them.)

Throughout our meal, there were other small signs of the “Marina-fication” of the restaurant: the (non-Asian) waitstaff’s confusion when one of us asked for some vinegar to mix into his dipping sauce for the phở meats. The fact that the phở arrived with only a single lime wedge and the tiniest imaginable pile of sliced jalapeños. (Not-so-pro tip: You just have to ask for more.) And, no surprise, the phở was priced about $5 higher than it was in the Tenderloin days, just a few years ago.

But when we actually dug into the food, we put aside all our skepticism. We started with an order of the fresh spring rolls stuffed with both shrimp and thin slices of pork — very light and very delicious, in large part because of the smokiness of the grilled pork, which lingered in our mouths. We also ordered the house-made crab chips (a perfect snack under any circumstance) and a plate of “Hanoi”-style chicken wings, which none of us remembered from any of the previous incarnations of Turtle Tower. These were whole, two-joint wings that we pulled apart with our hands, juicy and succulent, and fried to an attractive, crackly sheen.

Of course the main attraction was the phở itself. Turtle Tower has always specialized in northern-style phở — one of the purest distillations of the form that you can find in the Bay Area. That means the broth is less sweet and incorporates fewer spices and fresh herbs; instead of the giant plate of basil and bean sprouts that you get at southern-style joints, the soup comes topped with just a flurry of chopped scallions and cilantro. What you’re meant to taste is the pure flavor of the chicken or beef itself.

It had been too long since I’d eaten at the old Turtle Tower for me to say with certainty that the chicken phở was exactly the same. But all it took was one sip of that broth — clear, refined, intensely chicken-y with just a hint of ginger — to be fully satisfied. The noodles were wide and soft and highly slurpable, and even without my precious giblets, I could appreciate the silkiness of the shreds of both dark and white chicken meat.

The beef phở, which many of the restaurant’s Vietnamese regulars like even better than the chicken, is similarly minimalistic. Thin slices of rare beef come lightly pounded, in the northern style, for extra tenderness, and the broth, once again, homes in on the pure essence of beef flavor. Both phởs are the very embodiment of a soup that’ll cure what ails you.

When the new incarnation of Turtle Tower first opened in the Financial District, that location was also open late on weekends and ran a steeply discounted late-night happy hour menu starting at 11 p.m. — $2 oysters, $8 chicken wings, $4 beers and the like. Now that the Marina location is the only one keeping those late-night hours, the happy hour has been discontinued while the restaurant sorts out its liquor license. But once it does, a manager told us, they plan to start those deals up once again.

At the end of the night, we came away still a bit unsure of exactly what kind of “Marina person” the restaurant is hoping to attract, and how successful that effort has been. At least based on our visit, the crowd is a lot more restrained and low-key than we expected — no party people, just groups of two or three, mostly Asian Americans, quietly enjoying a bowl of phở at the end of the night.

Mostly, everyone just seemed pleased to have found this little oasis of home-cooked goodness — a shelter from all the blustery noise outside. Most of them, I’d dare to venture, seemed like they could handle a bowl of giblets.

Turtle Tower’s Marina location is open Sunday to Thursday 11 a.m.–9 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 11 a.m.–3 a.m. at 3145 Fillmore St. in San Francisco. The restaurant also has a location in the Financial District, at 220 California St., with shorter, non-late-night hours.