Blog
25.08.2009
To answer, the only way is to look into yourself and be yourself.
Life with Bánhmì11 is truly like living with a young child, where things unfold with greater rapidity, emotions run wild with greater intensity and people come together with greater frequency. We often feel like we are diving underwater. All these wonderful things pass by in front of us like in a dream but we can’t speak, we can’t share, we can just make simple signs. Words have become identical bubbles with no meaning and things that were sayable on the surface we walked before are no longer sayable in the space that we occupy now.
That’s why we needed to listen to the words of others. We asked anyone who will talk with us for opinions about the food and we have discussions at length about how to create the authentic bánh mì. Must bánh mì be accompanied by soy sauce or maggi sauce? Should the pickles be mild or sour? Do we use butter or mayo, and should the mayo be made with egg yolks or egg whites? Are we missing pork floss or sausage? Can xá xiú be white or must it be red? Do we slice or spread the pate?
The answers we received were infinite. Hanoians use melted butter but in Saigon bánh mì has home-made mayo and soy sauce is always present. Sydney bánh mì comes with cha lua and in New York they can resemble anything, from Philly cheesesteak to Southern barbeque. The constant factor, however, is not in the fillings but in the bread. Bánh mì in Vietnamese means bread, not a sandwich of any particular filling. An airy and crusty demi-baguette in the shape of a rugby ball and hidden among layers of blanket to be eaten warm- that is the only meaning of bánh mì. And as long as we work with The Spence to create a bread of this texture, we think we have stayed true to the meaning of bánh mì.
So at this point we decided we should avoid looking outside or else we will soon lose ourselves. The world has given us a lot of affirmation, from food bloggers, Time Out critics to our customers, our friends. Family and friends who know us before we had Bánhmì11 have supported us, guided us with their business acumen, shared with us recipes that can not be found in cookbooks but are passed on from people to people, generation to generation. And we are so grateful for your words, somehow they help us to be clearer in our vision, deeper in our faith in this venture and happier in life on less sleep.
That’s not to say all the words we received have been kind, sometimes they were mean, intentionally or perhaps inadvertently. Parents worry about us taking on too much, going into unknown territory, risking security and losing our place in life. Customers complain about not seeing enough meat or what they expect from home. Sometimes it’s not even what’s said but what’s unsaid, a look, a smirk, or a frown.
So in the pursuit of authenticity, what is more authentic than being yourself? In the quiet hours of the night, when your mind is empty and your body is tired, go into yourselves to ask if this is really worth it? Do we really love it? Is this a child that we created, a part of our flesh and bones, or is it actually a pet that can run stray? And from this self-seeking, the food that is created is then an expression of who we are. Yes Bánhmì11 is as authentically Vietnamese as we are, born and bred in that country that raised us and gave us its glorious food. And yes Bánhmì11 is as authentically London as we are, making a home in this city, trying to grow humbly and earnestly in this cosmopolitan mart.
Bánhmì11 is growing up, befriending those who value her and love her for who she is. Sometimes she cries when people put her down for things that she is still learning to become perfect at. But as for those who have nurtured her along the way, she adores you with all that childlike wonder and in her eyes, only you mean the world. For us, it means that we need not look outside for a stamp of approval on how authentic this food is, because the child has a soul of its own. It can stand on its own feet because it was created, not replicated. That’s why we may call Bánhmì11 “the art of Vietnamese baguette”.
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16.08.2009
New York, sometimes we still miss you, but no longer because of your bánh mì.
August 15th marked the beginning of a new chapter in Bánhmì11 and Ca Phe VN’s common history. Rob and Tuyen became proud parents. And as proud aunties, we can just imagine parading adorable baby girl Lotus around and bask in the glorious envy of all the yummy mummies of Broadway Market. She was born at seven minutes before five in the morning, and it was only by a “miracle” slightly smaller than her birth that Rob was there at 7 to set up the stall. With Rob having pulled an all-nighter and our main barista delayed by the train, everyone had to be in new positions. After a few glitches in the morning, we operated the stall with an efficiency that I think merited us of being called the SWAT team of Ca Phe VN.
In between waiting for the baby’s much anticipated arrival this week, we have been seeing old friends from New York on holiday in Europe, and thus reminiscing things past. In London, if you know about bánh mì, you most likely already know about it from elsewhere, whether it’s Saigon or Sydney. Likewise for us, our relationship with bánh mì started in Hanoi and continues here in London, and in between, we had New York.
There was an epoch in our lives when we lived in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in Long Island City, Queens. In a different time, under different circumstances, it would have not been so exciting or memorable to live among yellow cab repair garages at the foot of the 59th Street Bridge. But in my eyes, it was a heaven-sent habitat. Our brick building with a large old-fashioned stairway was on a residential tree-lined street with that rare luxury everyone takes for granted elsewhere in the country but which no one affords in Manhattan – a parking space. The apartment had old, but not creaking, oak wooden floor, nicely rectangular rooms and large windows with a view of the skyline across the bridge. On summer nights, we would pull up the window screens and sit out on the fire staircase to gaze at the mesmerizing shimmering lights, with our feet dangling in midair.
And as you live long enough in any place, you start to develop rituals. On Saturdays, we would ride the N train all the way to Canal Street to visit Paris Deli for our weekly fix of bánh mì. We would emerge from the subway in front of the Starbucks, turned right to go along Canal, pass all the garbage and fruit vendors and jewelry stores, turn left on Mott and find Paris Deli almost at the end of the second block. I would order the Number 1 Special, together with a milk tea bubble tea and get a few jars of yogurt to bring home. Now that we have Bánhmì11, I remember Paris Deli’s operations clearly. They had an electronic ordering system and your order would transmit from the cashier to the screens of the people making bánh mì in the adjoining room, where you picked up your sandwiches with a ticket. And more importantly, they baked their own bread from scratch on site. You could see the tall racks with baguette trays fresh out of the oven. But as I search my memory to remember what was so special about the Paris Deli bánh mì, I mostly remembered the post-bánh mì yogurt. Their yogurt comes in clear little plastic cups and tastes just like the stuff you get waking up from a nap in kindergarten in Hanoi. It was white like Greek yogurt, but smooth and mildly sweet with the distinct fragrance and flavor of condensed milk.
Good food is food worth reflecting upon. Which is perhaps why when you are twenty-something and actually in an affair with a big city, you thought you would remember its food, but it was rather the dessert that was memorable. With Paris Deli, it was less about the taste of the bánh mì, but more about the abundance of it. Like everything else in New York, it was always open, always available and always came in great variety. It persuaded you that it was a truer and deeper experience than whatever you had in the past. Somehow among this mass of millions of people, you still felt that it was singularly yours and even if you are always by yourself, you never feel alone. Traversing the grid of the city, I always thought I felt happy. Not in that sense of contentment but that feeling of happiness when you are very young, very free and very confident that life owed you every wonderful and adventurous thing.
It seems a long time ago but that romantic notion of infinite possibility never ceased to follow us. We have just decided to turn it into something of our own. Bánhmì11is our way of not just receiving, but returning; of not just consuming, but creating. Slowly Bánhmì11 is becoming, we hope, a destination in London, where you can come on your own, or bring a few friends, or come to meet other people. The real reward for us is in hearing people seek us out by word-of-mouth, in seeing friends return, in the precious moments after four when the market has quieted down and we can have a conversation with our visitors. Perhaps somehow Bánhmì11 can have that big-city-but-small-village sense of wonder, of everyone under these bright red umbrellas being perfectly strangers but perfectly connected.
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10.08.2009
Making bánh mì seems a simple pursuit, but with rules and repetition it can teach us a lot
"Remember the fire!"
One small observation about life is that despite how deceptively varied as it seems, much of it is actually repeated. It’s always about you doing something and life undoing it, over and over again. You eat and get hungry and eat again, you sleep and get tired and sleep again, you learn and forget and learn from almost scratch again. So then in general, I think human beings can only achieve something substantial out of a repetitious routine when we are very loved, very pushed or very disciplined.
For the three of us, we have probably relied on a lot of luck and a little of spontaneous intensity to get through life. Now gastronomical discipline means a two-facetted lesson in building a regimented operation to start with and getting chastised for your mistakes as you go along. Another sold-out Saturday last weekend was the result of many days of thought and preparation. It was the same process of mincing and mixing, shredding and soaking, cooling and cutting, all compounded with our hopes and enthusiasm.
Somehow, we were always thinking that at the end of the line, when we have put on the cilantro and sprinkled the chili sauce, bánh mì became a more artful thing, sublimely comforting and surprisingly intriguing. Try to take a Western staple like the baguette and throw “Vietnamese” infront of it, place yourself at the mercy of gourmets of Broadway Market, live up to the expectations and nostalgia for the Tribeca/Williamsburg/13e arrondissemont/Cambramatta bánh mì, and find a pricing point where you don’t have to break your back or bank account to keep the stall running. That must be chased after, yearned for, and worked at like an art.
Getting a regimented operation in place has been our goal for the past weeks. Things moved much faster at the stall last week when we had the oven on maximum capacity and constanly churning out steamingly hot baguettes. It is always interesting when your oven decides it won’t rise beyond 150 degrees when you really need it at 250, and the chemist in the group speculates that you should look at the color of the flame, orange or clear blue, to tell whether the gas tank needs refill. Then Duke of Edinburgh gold medalist fussed around pulling up engineering tricks with the camp stove. All was in vain though. We did however figured out that life is repetitious even in its rules, which in this case is that all good things come in three. Indeed, three is the optimal number of people for our bánh mì production. It takes one to staff the oven, one to stuff the bread before it goes into the oven, and one to stack all the freshness into it after the bread comes out. Last week we were constantly apologizing and thanking people for their patience. This week, people went “Oh it’s mine already?” when we hand them the made-to-order bánh mì as they are still getting their change.
The second part of discipline is of course that is not only an inner strength exercise, but also that you need the outside correction, which not easy to either give or receive. Some of you will know that we really adore Miu, our cat, and we rarely punish him for anything. So now when he makes trouble, I may yell and scream but he doesn’t hear or care. However, he is really scared of bà Trinh and as soon as she raises her voice, he runs away as fast as his four little feet could carry him. When you really love someone, it is all the harder to discipline them and it becomes more of thinking of their own good rather what makes your sappy soul feel good. And on the receiving end, if you ever wonder what all the cacophony behind the cart is about, it’s bà Trinh disciplining us. She gets really upset when we overload the ingredients- and we think we are being generous but actually we are distorting very basic gastronomical precepts.
So having discipline often comes back to a very simple principle: obey the rules. We were born so stubborn and we were raised to rebut rather than adhere. Sometimes though, we just have to learn to let go of ourselves and trust that someone else really does know better.
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03.08.2009
An intimate dialogue on raising Bánhmì11
Tin Tin- my little nephew
When you trade in an outdoor market, you are gambling with the weather gods. You look at the weather forecasts, think hard about how much foot traffic you can expect, recheck the weather forecast again every day and finally submit to the precariousness of British weather and place a bet on how many bánh mì you can prepare for the week, just in time for the bakers to do their job. In this game, there is no option to hedge and no lifeline to call, you will either destroy your margins by ordering too much or disappoint customers who trekked across London to find you. Like a fickle friend, sometimes the weather lets you down after a promising start and sometimes he makes it up to you in sunny bursts. Yesterday we thought was going to be a nasty rainy day, but actually the weather held up quite well and we were sold out by 2PM.
The bread turned out more beautiful this week, baked to a just perfect golden-brown. We also made the pate creamier, which added moisture without compromising the bread’s crispiness or the pickle’s crunchiness. You may notice that the bread vary slightly in size, but this is purely because each and everyone of them is hand-crafted. The weight remains exactly the same, 140 gram of doug, but the baguettes will not look identical as those produced through an industrial process. Artisanal bread brings an uniqueness in flavor, texture and to a degree, also size. That said, we are working with The Spence to achieve a certain uniformity to the baguettes because we understand, consistency is one of the trademarks of good quality.
I think it’s fair to say that all of us are head-over-heels in love with Bánhmì11. You know that feeling of anticipation and butterflies in your stomach, that’s how we feel as Saturday is approaching. And that moment when you wake up and try to remember your last conscious thought before you go to sleep, the first thing that enters our minds is bánh mì. And just like when you are so obsessed with someone you manage to direct all your conversations with friends to be about that person, I think our friends are between being intrigued by our enthusiasm and wondering if they should bill us by the hour for listening. Bánhmì11 is our brainchild and we are completely enamored with it. We eat, talk, think, sleep and dream banh mi. The other day I woke up and realized that I dreamt we had a solvency problem – completely nightmarish. And I dreamt that the pate was not congealing, instead falling apart like biscuit crumbs and the cilantro all had marks of snail bites on them – very scary in a science-fiction way.
When I am not panicking in my dreams though, we have been worrying about how to raise this child, as parents usually do. What values do we need to plant? What self-image do we want it to grow up with? Where do we want us to live? What kind of people do we want it to grow up with? As it grows, our responsibilities increases. It’s not just about milk bottles and warm baths, it’s about bringing up another being. How do we do that with the resources we have, in the environment we are in? How do we give it as many opportunities as we can afford? So we asked for help, from friends whom we trust to be godmother and godfather to Bánhmì11. You will probably see them soon all over our baby. And we talked to other parents, or people who seemingly were just born with a wealth of parenting knowledge. Sometimes we even plot them to take us out and pick up the tab for the best scrambled eggs and french toast breakfast in town! For the time being though, there are no easy answer but I guess we will think it up as we go along. Indeed, is there any other way to go along?
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