While Phở Đuôi Bò is best known for its blowtorched wagyu beef, the East San José restaurant’s phở itself is worth seeking out in its own right. (Thien Pham)
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.
When we pulled into the strip mall parking lot in Eastside San José at a little past 9 o’clock on a recent Friday night, the whole plaza had mostly shut down for the night: the beauty salon, the durian dessert shop, the vegan tofu deli. The one restaurant still open, a neon-lit beacon in the night, was Phở Đuôi Bò, where about a dozen would-be diners mingled on the curb outside, waiting for a table.
Their goal? To snag one of the city’s most talked-about bowls of phở — and, especially, for its blowtorched wagyu beef, served on top.
Both of us had eaten at Đuôi Bò before and liked it enough to return on multiple occasions, families in tow. But the restaurant hit our radar again this summer when it put up a neon “LATE NIGHT EATS” sign and extended its hours past midnight — a rarity in a city whose excellent phở shops mostly close by 8 or 9 p.m. Đuôi Bò, on the other hand, is now open from 9 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. every day of the week: breakfast, lunch, dinner and second dinner. The shop’s hours are so long, we got dizzy just imagining the size of their stock pot.
The crowd is largely Vietnamese (with other assorted Asians), but less overwhelmingly so than at many of San José’s other top phở spots. There were at least two or three tables’ worth of diverse, non-Asian twentysomethings who’d waited in line like everyone else — evidence, perhaps, of the restaurant’s recent popularity among the South Bay’s food influencer class. A lot of times you can tell how good an Asian restaurant is by its cross-generational appeal. Even at 9 p.m., there seemed to be as many 70-year-old Vietnamese aunties and uncles lining up for a hot bowl of phở as there were big groups of college kids.
When Phở Đuôi Bò first opened in 2024, the restaurant captured the attention of local phở lovers by offering flame-blasted Kobe beef as a topping option, sizzling the well-marbled slices of meat with a mini blowtorch tableside: the very definition of a gimmicky, Insta-viral offering. As it turns out, the torched beef (not really “Kobe,” as it’s listed on the menu, but American wagyu from Snake River Farms) is delicious (more on that in a second).
But beyond the flashy pyrotechnics, the core of the restaurant is a lot more rustic and homey. During our visit, the soundtrack was a mix of smooth jazz and old Vietnamese love ballads. In this age of tacky AI-generated wall art, the handpainted murals that line Đuôi Bò’s dining room depict Vietnamese countryside scenes — a bull rearing up in a grassy plain, a resplendently garnished bowl of phở. Nothing about the place reads as overtly “cool” or trendy. And nothing tastes homier than the phở broth itself.
The restaurant recently extended its hours, which means its phở is now available until 12;30 a.m. daily. (Thien Pham)
The name “đuôi bò” means oxtail, so of course we decided to order the deluxe oxtail phở, which comes with all the meats you’d get in a bowl of đặc biệt (“special”) phở, plus a big, meaty tailbone that we happily gnawed clean. Here’s our pro tip, though: The reason the restaurant has that name is because it uses dozens of oxtails to make the broth itself, through hours upon hours of slow simmering. The end result is that those tails wind up rather chewy, and all of the flavor has gone into the broth, which is some of the richest and most flavorful we’ve had in the Bay. It’s loaded with collagen and big, glistening droplets of fat, but also clean and light on the palate. And that’s the same broth you get no matter which phở you order.
For our second bowl, then, we stuck with our usual favorites: raw steak (served on the side so we could poach it in the hot soup at the last minute), the soft tendons, the fatty brisket and bouncy meatballs. We opted for the wider, springier fresh noodles, and doctored up a little dipping sauce for our meats: some fish sauce and Sriracha, a clutch of vinegared onions (available as a $1 side), a squeeze of lime. Đuôi Bò also offers Chinese fried crullers as a side dish. Fresh out of the deep fryer, these make an excellent addition to a bowl of phở; the contrast between their crunchiness and the bit of sogginess they pick up after they’ve bobbed around in the soup for a minute is just sublime.
Phở Đuôi Bò is open 9 a.m.–12:30 a.m. daily at 2465 Alvin Ave. in San José.