RESTAURANT NEWS | IOWA
There’s Three Kitchens Under One Roof at Pho Dee-Licious
In Des Moines, the Nguyen family serves Chinese classics, Vietnamese pho, and Lao dishes alongside them.
By Jamie Dutton
6:47 a.m. ET, Oct. 22, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.
Pho Dee-Licious sits near Drake University in Des Moines, in the stretch locals call Dogtown, and the menu behind that counter runs in three directions at once: Chinese, Vietnamese, and Lao, all of it from the Nguyen family’s kitchen.
The Nguyens have cooked at this address for years; the son, the kitchen’s cook for over 20 years, has taken over from his parents and widened the menu. The family’s Chinese dishes stayed. The pho and the Lao cooking are what’s new.
Bún bò huế
The Vietnamese side of the menu centers on pho. There are nine bowls, and the signature one, named for the restaurant, loads in eye round steak, brisket, beef meatballs, tripe, and tendon. There’s a chicken pho in a homemade chicken broth, a seafood bowl with shrimp, scallops, squid, and crab, and a smaller kids’ bowl. Every bowl comes with a garnish plate of bean sprouts, basil, lime, and jalapeño on the side, and a choice of regular or wide rice noodles. Spring rolls wrap shrimp and pork with vermicelli and lettuce in rice paper.
The Lao dishes are the least familiar to those of us who have been eating at this address for years, and they’re worth slowing down for. Khao poon gai is a curry chicken noodle soup in a coconut curry broth. Khao piak sen uses homemade rice noodles and chicken in a slow-simmered chicken broth. Laap is minced beef or chicken seasoned with lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, toasted rice powder, and fresh herbs, served with sticky rice. There’s also a green papaya salad and a house-made Lao pork sausage.
Khao poon
None of that displaces the family’s Chinese cooking. The Chinese menu runs to 25 entrées: sesame chicken, cashew chicken, lo mein, egg foo young, and fried rice among them. Each entrée arrives with a choice of egg drop or hot and sour soup, an egg roll or a crab rangoon, and steamed or fried rice.
Cashew chicken
The dining room gives away that there’s a new generation in charge. There’s a wall of painted nón lá, the leaf hats worn across Vietnam, marble tables, and a red and gold gate by the counter.
The tables are set the way a regular would want them, with chopsticks, spoons, chili oil, and sriracha already waiting, so nobody has to flag down a server for the basics. Three kitchens’ worth of cooking, one family behind the counter, all of it at once.
