Yesterday I had a beef lok lak in Cambodia. Lok Lak is small chunks of beef in a ginger gravy with a pot of black pepper sauce. The sauce was awesome. Cambodia has a famous Kampot black pepper that grows in the Kampot province. It's part of their "pepper culture".
Today we had some Pho in HCMC and it was good. To me it was less beefy, less salty or possibly msg than at home. For herbs there was the regular basil leaves and another herb that looked a bit like dandelion. Overall the soup was a cleaner or clearer than I've had back home.
But food will depend on which restaurant you go to... What pho tastes like in Vietnam is like asking what sushi tastes like in Vancouver. There are trends and that is interesting but the different cooks will have some influence.
For example, in Thailand I had the best pad thai I've ever had. It was at a restaurant called Lin Pin in Bangkok. I don't really like Pad Thai, but this one was really good - there was this aweseome crunchyness to the peanuts, which when I looked further I realized wasn't the peanuts but some dried shrimp. The bean sprouts were meatier, the basil that came with the meal was a full on handful of basil (like if you bought 2 or 3 of those fresh basil packs from Safeway and just threw it down on the plate.
I (and Kim too) also had the worst Pad Thai - we got it from the Bangkok airport. It smelled too fishy. When we landed in Phuket Kim barfed. Then she barfed again into my fleese jacket in the car on the way to the hotel. So after picking out the barfy pad thai that absorbed into my fleece - we stopped having Pad Thai.
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