Ah, winter. Even while wishing for a mountaintop fireplace, darting from place to place for warmth, the first layering of woolens, drabbest down or brightest fleece begin to muffle forms and features. The back of the closet comes to the front, here's the Siberian mufti, the Antarctic-suited yakwear. Fake fur crests featureless bulk. Polar bears scram past on bicycles, tempting chap and chafe.

Aromas halt at open doorways. Stop dead. Hang there. In the invisible crystal field of cold air, smells seem to shatter, drop like insincere promises.

I lunge through Vien Dong's exotic wall. I strip down to as few layers as possible, grateful for Tacoma Power.

I sit, melting, under the neon "OPEN" sign in the window. I am the only customer - shivering or otherwise.

I need a minute to collect myself, and the waiter, seeing this, backs off, laughing quietly while I sit making a pile.

I unwrap my napkin package - fork, spoon, chopsticks, pho spoon, scrub the edges of my nose with the napkin.

"Ready?" the waiter asks.

"Yes, I think so."

We both look outside. Viet My Gift Shop resembles the Snow Miser's lair.

I turn back to the waiter, order Vietnamese coffee and a giant bowl of pho bo chin - well done beef rice noodle and out of this world delicious. He writes, nods. "One minute," he says - which sounds terribly optimistic, even if I am his only customer - and retreats.

As two Vietnamese families strolled in one minute a part I pondered this SAT-style question: Haute French cuisine is to British as Japanese kaiseki-ryori is to blank. Give up? It's Vietnamese - specifically, pho - a cuisine about as diametrically opposed to the formality of Japanese as you can get. People study tea kaiseki for years, learning how to form the rice and walk through the door and serve the natto and make the tea, trying to master it the way others study edo sushi techniques or origami. Pho, in comparison, is the ultimate do-it-yourself Asian cuisine. It is big where Japanese is little, expansive where Japanese is precious. And like Brit cooking (which, until recently, has been more concerned with practicality and utility than, say, taste), it is peasant food, lacking any pretension, based on frugality and the whole-food ethos that demands the use of any possible edible bit of everything used in its making. That means flank and round as well as loin, bone and marrow, tendon, tail and tripe - everything.

Pho broth is slow-cooked, simmered and reduced simple stock kicked up with onions boiled until translucent, green onion stalks and spices. There's always salt, but never pepper. I've tasted star anise and cinnamon before, and lemongrass and soy. Pho broth is never the same from one place to the next, or even from one day to the next at the same place. Every minute the broth sits on the stove changes its character in small ways. Every minute it sits before your cooling as you eat changes it. The soup at the top of the bowl will taste different from the soup at the bottom. Along with the broth come noodles, of course - a softened nest of them is laid in the bowl before the broth is poured over the top. That changes the pho's temperament. So do all the other ingredients, including proteins in wondrous, sometimes frightening variety, and the sides upon sides upon sides.

My sides start appearing. A plate piled with mung-bean sprouts, mint leaves on the stem, whole stalks of mild purple basil, bright green slices of jalapeño and quarters of lime. Already on the table are salt and pepper, two kinds of hoisin sauce, a bottle of soy sauce, and a honey pot of red-pepper paste that's murderously hot - all to help customize the pho that arrives in a huge bowl, filled to the brim. Pho is all about generosity, about more than you expected and more than you could ever need. My pho the size of my head arrives, and I begin the tinkering process.

Vien Dong offers fours kinds of pho, nine hu tieu and seven bun noodle soups, each requiring a different touch of this or that to be made perfect. My bowl is one of the simplest, most subtle bowls on the board. I tear up basil; add some cilantro, a touch of red-pepper paste, two drops of soy and stir. It's not quite there; so I add some whole basil and let the pho steep, then give it just the barest squeeze of lime. With good pho, you can smell when it comes together. A fragrant steam rises off the bowl, heady with kitchen spice plus all that I've added. I lower my head, close my eyes and taste.

Outside, a bald man goes hatless. "It's silly in Tacoma," I think as sweat rolls off the top of my head.

Vien Dong Restaurant, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday, 3801 S. Yakima Ave., Tacoma, inexpensive, 253.472.6668