PEOPLE SEEM TO think I can barbecue, but that is where they are wrong. I can eat barbecue. I can eat it with the best of them. As for barbecuing barbecue, I fire up my grill with the tenacity (and audacity) of a really dumb bird beating into a window. Our success rates are similar too. Every now and again – say once every blue moon – the window just happens to be open (hot day, somebody burnt the toast ...), and then me and the bird sit down and peck and pick apart that butterflied chicken or slab of ribs about as happily as any king ever ate caviar. Or slabs of ribs, or whatever kings eat when they're eating like kings.

The rest of the time, when the moon is sort of whitish yellow or even orange, my little feathered friend winds up on its back in the flower bed, kicking its feet in disbelief, while I sit head in hands at the dinner table, kicking myself for not taking the chicken off sooner, or leaving the pork chops on longer. Or maybe it was the marinade.

But every dirty diaper has a silver lining – which is a cute little baby, in most cases; but in this case, since I'm speaking double figuratively, it's the fact that I've become somewhat of an expert at the next-day salvage job. If I was the type of writer who wrote stuff down, or even remembered anything, I could make a whole cookbook out of meals I made from botched barbecue attempts.

Let's see ... Underdone Barbecued Chicken Noodle Soup would be the most obvious entry. Burnt Brisket Pot Pie. My most recent save situation produced Spaghetti with Oversmoked Pork Chop Sauce. What else? Baby Back Disaster Dogs with Chili and Onions. Charcoalated Potato Pancakes. Salmon-That-Fell-on-the-Porch Croquettes. I could go on and on, but that would entail starting to make stuff up, and then I'd be in danger of losing my hard-earned journalism awards. So ...

Pho Tan Phat had two TVs. One had a food channel special on barbecuing that featured close-up shots of raw cuts of meat, perfectly cooked racks of ribs, and just juice in general. The other had hot hot hot babes in bikinis and various other states of undress, gyrating and simulating sex and whatnot to some sort of music – music videos, I believe these things are called by "those in the know." But I wouldn't know any more than I now know how to barbecue, because wasn't it just my luck to be the only person in the place, my table included, seated with my back to both TVs! My view – when I wasn't diving into a bowl of pho big enough to teach a baby to swim in – was of everyone else's glazed eyes.

I can tell you this, sociologically speaking, based on a representative cross-section of one of my friends, my wife, and a couple of Vietnamese guys ... given the above choice of visual stimulations, 10 out of 10 Americans (including Vietnamese guys) would rather watch the food channel than soft-core porn.

Take that, cheesecake; beefsteak rules!

So do bowls of pho so big you could teach a baby to swim in them. For $5.20, and it was good soup too. It was soup you could sink your teeth into – there was that much meat to it; and this wasn't last night's save-situation meat, either. It was dropped in raw on the way to your table, which I appreciated, by way of a change.

Other than which: a massive mass of bottom-dwelling rice noodlage and all the usual additives. Jalapeños, bean sprouts, basil, and a kind of elongated cilantro that doesn't look like cilantro but tastes like it, hoorah!

I was the only one eating instead of drinking at our table. Well, to be polite, Crawdad had ordered this appetizer that was supposed to be charbroiled pork loin but was actually more like pork balls, breaded and fried – so who's complaining. In any case, it came with lettuce, mint, sprouts, tomato, rice noodles, and rice paper to wrap it all up in. Then you dip this in peanut sauce, if you want, and man is it good.

Atmospherically, well, I already told you what was on TV, so that was pretty much the atmosphere. If you could see it. For me it was your run-of-the-mill Tenderloin Vietnamese dive. Fish tanks in the window, fluorescent lights, lightning-scaring-horses art, and pleasantly goofy teacup glasses that I'd drink wine out of, if it was up to me, since they were decorated with grapes and grape leaves.