If you can get past the year-round display of Christmas lights strung outside and the front of the house being as faded as the acid-washed denim your parents wore in high school, then you'll discover the reason this stalwart beat all comers in the Weekly's 2011 Final Pho tournament. Our Vietnamese-noodle experts named this the best bowl in our Little Saigon—which pretty much makes it the best pho in the U.S. The watchword here is consistency: Each bowl that leaves the kitchen has great soup, with beef perfectly cooked until tender and silken strands of rice noodles cooked just right, without any pasty clumping you'd see in lesser shops. But you don't eat beef? Then try the equally rock-solid chicken version. Any Jewish grandmother would proudly claim the schmaltz-slicked, golden stock as her own. How about roasted-duck noodle soup? On Saturdays and Sundays, Thanh Lich makes a delicious bowl of bun, its noodles cut into short lengths, and a broth flavored with young, tender marinated bamboo shoots. The $6.50 "small" bowl of pho tai dac biet, fully loaded with all the cuts of beef, including tendon, tripe and filet mignon, becomes an even better happy-hour value on weekdays from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., when a slightly less meat-filled bowl (no filet mignon) sells for an insane $2.99! $