Say it ain't so, Pho. . .

Oh my... chagrin (deep) and despondency (utter). How could they? Post-last-call gourmets, gourmands and fur-bearin' varmints alike among the ESIs demand to know the meaning of this! For goodness' sake!

After we waxed all exuberant about Mr Pho on Elgin Street's felicitously diverse menu, they deleted poutine from the sign.

If this was the other side of the Ottawa River, perhaps we could see the twitchy hands of the infamous Language Police. But those particular officious bureaucratic twits do not patrol here. Yet. We have plenty of others.

And anyhoo, if I recall my colonial-era geopolitics correctly, Viet Nam and France once had a close relationship, such that decades later, the (heh...) lingua franca of that country is still pretty much French. It's a French Fact.

So why is there not room on Mr Pho's shiny new sign for peaceful coexistence, a diplomatic detente for the two great solitudes of Pho and Poutine? Tasty, tasty solitudes.... I digress.

One hesitates, in these benighted times and in this context, to stir up the currently-loaded term 'reasonable accommodation'. Yet it seems to my dust-glazed approximately-amber prairie eyes that, indeed, nothing on that sign replaces the deliciousity that is poutine. Except, well, a sad, sad blank space, pretty much exactly the right size for the word 'poutine'...

Why can't they all just get along again? I mean, it's not like the remaining Pho (...well, 'noodle soup'...), Pad Thai and Shawarma are exactly kissin' culinary cousins. So what happened? Enquiring minds need to pho... ummm, know...