Looking back it has already been more than a month since we started at our new stall at Broadway Market. The weeks seem to run together into a circular chain of events that is barely distinguishable by the market sessions on Saturdays. Each day’s work follows on to the previous one, almost uninterrupted by a few hours of sleep at night.
Our hope, to the extent that we had any during that week of uncertainty, was that the mere act of being able to show up at the market on Saturdays, would sustain banh mi on the culinary landscape of London. Amazingly, it is proving to do just that. In our new position, the colorful collage of Vietnamese streets turns heads. And when we grill the Imperial BBQ, the smell of thinly sliced marinated pork cooking on open fire make passers-by very curious to try. For most people, it was going to be their first taste of banh mi.
On a deeper level, the new stall is transforming Banhmi11 and changing our operations in ways we hadn’t foreseen. The amount of food and equipments we bring to the market seems to multiply every week. We have gone from transporting them on the back of bicycles, to towing them behind in bike trailers, to stuffing them into a van, then taking out the seats of the same dark red van and putting in large canvas bags and now piles of blue and yellow crates.
Some weekends were quiet, when the weather had not been kind to us and rain showers came and went throughout the day. So in those late afternoons we sat on the stools outside the stall, eating carefully divided, lovely moist, fudge-like squares of brownies that John our neighboring bread man had given us, and sipping lotus green tea that we give out for free with banh mi. Sometimes we exchanged banh mi for mocha from Climpson’s, cupcakes from Violet, juice from the Juice Bar and gathered all our goodies triumphantly to take home. It can feel a bit sad that we didn’t sell out those days; but that is probably a good thing, because otherwise it would mean that we are not doing something right, not working hard enough to make enough food.
Then after Easter the weather got much warmer, daffodils were appearing everywhere and people covered London Fields on warm, sunny Saturdays. Everyone seems well pleased and intrigued seeing how we prepare banh mi in plain view, and we hear the oh-and-ah when Anh cooks steak to order for Op-La-Di Steak banh mi. It feels so unnerving when we get a big take-away order and as frantically as we can move, the queue is still elongating behind the organic meat van. In those moments, I have taken to looking straight ahead at the customers we are serving, avoiding the sweat beads that build up whenever I glanced sideway at everyone who is waiting. Towards 3.30pm, we had started to sell out and I had the horrible task of going to the back of the queue and apologizing to our customers that we were selling out. Seeing their disappointed, or perhaps fed-up expressions hurts more than going home with unsold bread and eating roast pork for dinner every night.
When I go home, and by that I do not mean the house on the other side of Kingsland Road where all of us live and work, but the place where my parents are, a small town in Niedersachsen, Germany, I still have a hard time explaining to them what we do. It’s hard to grasp that something as simple as making sandwiches every weekend can teach us so much about who we are, what we are good at, and where we fall short. We grew up in families that prioritized doing homework over helping with dinner in the kitchen and we were groomed to work with our minds, not our hands.
But what Banhmi11 is teaching us is that the most engaging work requires our minds, our hands and our hearts. Sustaining and improving the taste of the food, looking for suppliers, working against time to keep the freshest ingredients, marinating to the perfect flavor, keeping the team motivated is a battle that we fight every day. And to make it to market every week, arriving in rain or shine, departing with or without any left-over, is winning.
In this pursuit, what enable Banhmi11 to exist is our customers. Somehow we are blessed with the most amazing customers, who don’t get mad waiting, don’t mind trying new fillings, and don’t hesitate to bring new friends. The people are what we remember from the past month.
The young man with a bookish messenger bag and black pea coat who solemnly studied the menu and said: “This is my first time trying this…how is it pronounced…ban-me?” The family of husband, wife, and father-in-law who came to us and trustingly asked “My wife is pregnant, what can she eat?” The really energetic regular who drives his motorbike from Notting Hill to Bethnal Green for his banh mi and tells us: “You guys have the best jobs, you make people smile.”
We would like to speak to them more. We would like to sit down in the slow afternoons and perhaps have a chat about where they live, what parts of the world gave them this addiction to banh mi, would like to know what adventures they lived through in Vietnam, but things are changing and we often don’t have enough time for that. So I hand them an OpLaDi Steak, wrapped in extra tissues, warn them that it can be messy to eat with the runny egg, and thank them for their waiting.
Banhmi11 is moving to our own stall at Broadway Market
Goodbye to all that...
We are so excited to be telling you that we are moving into our own stall at Broadway Market! We are currently sharing a stall with Ca Phe VN but starting Saturday we will have our very own place! It may seem strange to you if you haven’t visited us, but this weekend is going to be a really meaningful day for us as we start on our own. The scary part is still ahead of us but so are the possibilities! At least we are so glad we survived. That we still can exist at Broadway, and we’ll tell you why.
Now since we returned from Vietnam in January a lot of things have happened, but one of the things that became definite this week was that Ca Phe VN decided to end our partnership starting this weekend. Rob and Tuyen will start making banh mi of their own and no longer wish to have us operate in the same stall. As you know, Ca Phe VN makes excellent coffee that goes down very well with banh mi. We always thought that banh mi and coffee goes hand in hand, just like toast and tea, so it was at this very stall, on the tiny stainless steel mini-stools in the middle of Benjamin Close that we proposed to do banh mi.
For the past eight months, the stall has been our home on Saturdays and we really treasure the moments when we get to sit down and relax as a customer. This little alley is like a corner of Saigon in the middle of East London, with a similar energy, creativity and sense of constant change. It was here that we first learned the ropes of running a stall, waiting for time to pass on a rainy afternoon when the market is empty or coping with the panic of piling orders during the lunch rush.
It was here that we did the small things we consider so extraordinary in our very ordinary lives. When Rob and Tuyen’s baby was born in the summer last year, he came to the market from the hospital having stayed up all night. So we stood behind the till and made coffee and felt a strange sense of serenity that the staff and we were running the stall, while the proud father was napping on a chair. Then there was the weekend when my parents were visiting, he was ill and could not bring the van with all our equipments. So my parents got to see three girls trying to set up a gazebo, put up signs by climbing on a bike, beg for electricity from the Laundromat next door and carry water from the cellar of the Broadway grocer to make coffee. No matter what, it was always our intention to keep the stall open in rain or shine, to not have a customer show up and be disappointed at the empty space where the stall usually occupies, to seamlessly serve really good food and drinks without thinking about who really owns what.
Perhaps that’s because we are stubborn, or we are workaholic, or we are beginners and amateurs with too much energy and too little sense. Perhaps that’s because we have been fools to go into such a partnership, not foreseeing that either way we would have been prey of our own success or our own failure.
Yesterday we were in almost despair; it’s almost impossible you see to get into a real food market in London. But the stars aligned in a way that Broadway Market management were so helpful to us – we have incredible respect for the community here. We are so happy that we are just nervous and almost cannot believe it until we really set our stall up on Saturday. Things will be a bit shabby to start with, so bear with us until we can decorate the stall. But the food will be the same, and hopefully better than the last time you tasted it.
There is no excuse but you must know that even though we have been away from the blog, we have been at the market, cooking up new varieties of banh mi. Imperial BBQ, thin slices of sirloin pork soaked overnight in a special marinade inspired by Hue-the old imperial city, is quickly becoming a heavy-weight contestant to the perennial favorite Quad Meat. It hits the spot every time and even though we love the traditional mixed meat variety, we confess that we must refrain ourselves all the time from picking at the yummy fragrant pork, hot off the grill, so that we actually have some left for customers.
So if you can make time for us on Saturday, we will be at Broadway in our brand-new pitch. This is a new beginning, a marvelous thing for all of us. Against all odds, this is the chance we have got to take. And you, will you travel with us on this new road?
Two Saturdays ago was the last time we traded at Broadway because of the horrible autumn rain. Rob was sick so we got on our bikes and begged and pleaded for water and electricity from neighboring stores to keep the stall open. The stall looked different but it was opened! We could do this when it was dry but with the rain and wind of the past weekends, we had to sit it out.
This week Bánhmì11 is busy preparing banh mi to sponsor the Vietnamese cultural show the students at LSE are putting on on Saturday and we got thinking about what we ate in those student days, when we were young and free.
The first meals we had outside of home were at boarding schools. Generally now and even then, we knew that the meals were bad. Breakfast was usually the best meal of the day; that is if you managed to get up more than fifteen minutes before class. Our school kitchen must have been extreme believers in monotony because breakfast always alternated between either all things boiled, or all things fried. Mondays started out with boiled eggs, grits, and biscuits (in the American sense which is a soft, flaky bread, that was scorned by all Germans) whereas on Tuesdays we had fried eggs, bacon and hash browns. At weekends however, breakfast morphed into the most glorious meal of the week – brunch, when we could sleep in until noon and stagger in in our pajamas ten minutes before the cafeteria closes to have all the boiled and fried breakfast food we missed all week. On top of that there were French toast, Danish pastries, fresh fruits instead of the usual sloppy cocktail fruit mix and sometimes even an omelette bar.
Lunch and especially dinner, however, were composed of dishes so unidentifiable that each meal was a strategic game of selecting a few edible elements from a dish to put onto our plates. It may involve taking the fried batter off a pepper, or lifting carrots from swimming with overcooked broccoli in a greasy, vinegary liquid, or mashing up eggs from the salad bar to eat with spaghetti. None of this, as you can tell, was appetising, normally.
But we ate them ravenously, because we were sixteen or seventeen and always running, up and down the hundreds of stairs connecting the castle to the lower buildings, to and from the dorm, across the soccer field to catch the van for our afternoon activities, and back to our rooms in time for the ten o’clock nightly check. If they gave us chocolate chips cookies and milk in mid-afternoon, we ate them too, and stuffed two or three in between our folders to snack on under the table during class. By the time we queued up for our food and sat down at the table, we would have gladly wolfed down boiled shoe soles without complaint.
In my second year, things improved significantly culinarily with the arrival of my new roommate from Singapore. Unlike most of us whose parents lived overseas, Claire’s dad brought her to school, and with him she had a whole suitcase full of snacks, noodles, sauces and a brand new multi-function rice cooker. It was placed ceremonially on top of the bookshelf separating our two halves of the room and often in the wee hours of the night, there would be steam arising from whatever strange concoction we had put into it.
These were the best suppers. It was truly the wonder of one-pot cooking, with no kitchen sink and no grocery store nearby except for occasional trips to Walmart, which was like a giant convenience store with no fresh meats, fruits or vegetables. In those days we were in love with sesame oil, dried seaweed and oyster sauce. So whatever instant package of ramen or glass noodle or rice vermicelli or soba we had at hand, we spiced them up with these three ingredients. We even rubbed sesame oil under our nose and walked around sniffing it all the time and fell into helpless giggles. Mmmm…It seems so silly now but it was so natural back then.
Without these suppers, it seemed we lived in a hopeless desert gastronomically. But the longer you stay in any place, the more chances that you will discover havens of good food. For us, these havens were the teachers’ houses.
Judy was our Maths teacher, not mine really, but I gladly went along to the study sessions at her home. There would be hot chocolate, home-made brownies, cakes, and one time before Christmas I remember she had the biggest box of popcorn I have ever seen. There was plain popcorn, and chocolate popcorn, and caramel popcorn, and toffee popcorn and salted popcorn. To this day I can’t tell the difference between integers and integrals but I can still savor the taste of caramel popcorn, which I ate handfuls of until I was almost sick, and went back to bed before exam day.
Ravi-ji was our Economics teacher, actually he was more of a legend than a teacher. We loved him and feared him with godlike admiration and everyone, even the most annoying kid in school, agreed that he must have been a saint. He was probably in his fifties, although his perfectly trimmed mustasche made him look older and wiser, and lived with his mother. Mommy-ji often had dinner parties and most of us were likely to have the honor to come at least once this special dinner, unless you were from the Indian subcontinent, in which case you seemed self-entitlted to come every week. From the pre-dinner drinks that came in blue glasses to the fragrant rice to the raisin and almond dessert, the food served was simply divine. It was so good that whenever we got a chance to go to Santa Fe and visit the Indian buffet in one of the adobe houses, we always looked for the halwa, hoping to experience something that resembles the exquisit taste of Mommy-ji’s.
Ravi-ji and Mommy-ji’s dinner was the first time that somewhere in my consciousness, I woke up to the fact that food was something beautiful to be shared with and powerful to bring people together. Raji-ji loved chocolate and his old students always sent him chocolates from whichever corner of the world they were in, and he always shared them with us in class, Lindt truffles and Cadbury’s almond chocolate. Probably because Economics was the last period before dinner and ended at quarter past six. Probably because he saw us as the starved puppies we always were. And probably because of this, no matter how we failed in other subjects, how we misbehaved outside of class, how we moved on in life to do things we are or are not proud of, we never wanted to disappoint Ravi-ji. We wanted to do well in his tests so that we could arrive at his house for dinner without guilt. We wanted to grow up to be like the students who sent him chocolates, whose pictures and press clippings he pinned up on the wall, who wrote that they graduated and went on to do important things. Those were the powers and pleasures and pains of good food.
It was a surprise that all of us made it out from of boarding school, without gaining or losing too much weigh, or getting one or two ulcers, or a nasty appendix operation, or food allergies. It was different for us to be in an isolated community far from a big city. But we were a community, teachers and students, roommates and friends, and this probably saved us.
Now things have changed in many ways. When our cousins came to visit us on boarding school half-term the other day, instead of waiting to be fed, they went grocery shopping in Harrods Food Hall (fancy kids!), and cooked us a full meal of beef and potato wedges with tomato sauce, minced meat and spring onions omellet, and cabbage and ribs soup – all of which we would not have managed at sixteen.
But somehow, even in a much different place and different time, we’d like to be a little haven of good food for students in London. We are happiest when we see students come to the stall. They come after their language assessment, or weekend job, or simply on a leisurely Saturday morning, for a cup of coffee with condensed milk and a banh mi with pate. They usually never come alone, and the group seems to grow and disband throughout the day. They joke around with us and sometimes daringly ask for discounts. They make lots of noise most of the time but they patiently quietly wait when we have a big rush. When they know us, they don’t hesitate to roll up their sleeves to help us pack up.
We always think when we see them: “These guys are like us before, but better…sharper, funnier, and worldlier.” And that, in between our banh mi mouthfuls is, I can tell you, a very happy thought!
Two weeks, four days, pouring rain on three of them, hundred of hours of planning, cooking, setting up and taking down. Camden was hard work, anxiety, exhaustion, anger, determination, joy, and pride, all bundled up into one experience. You see, food business is like show business. Regardless of what happens in our personal lives, of the things that we can and can not control, of what goes on behind the scene, what matters is that the show must go on.
And on it went, through bicycle rides from Islington to Camden with all our equipments in three bike trailers, gusty winds of late autumn that splashed rain on everything, heavy puddles that built up on top of the tarpaulin cover, wet shoes and wet socks, burned fingers and cold feet, fumbling in the dark to pack up, and feeling our heart sunk when somebody failed to show up, at moments when we really needed more hands to help.
But then again on it went, through the sunny Sunday that felt like Indian summer t-shirt weather, celebrating a birthday in exhausted exhilaration, the joy of discovering making banh mi with electrical appliances instead of our usual gas stove, the excitement in churning out consistently strong, sweet coffee, meeting face-to-face with those who follow us on Twitter, seeing the group of Vietnamese-Australians who come out for the pop-up stall, smiling when whole families who had never heard of banh mi came back for seconds, and explaining to Parisians how a Vietnamese baguette is different.
Camden was meant as a three-week pop-up stall. It could have been longer and it has turned out to be shorter. We wanted it to turn into a relationship, because you have asked Bánhmì11 to go West, to be closer to a tube station, to open on more days. But for now it looks like Camden was a fling, because you know sometimes sheer efforts don’t make up for chemistry. Camden is boisterous, bustling, unashamedly derivative of its former, more original self, transient like the foot steps of out-of-town weekend visitors, and colorful but unadventurous when it comes to food. Bánhmì11 is always seeking permanence, planting roots and going local, and obsessing about the small things like deciding between grinding or pounding peppercorn. Sometimes, as much as we want, it is simply not the right time and the right place for magic to happen.
But it doesn’t mean that what happened was not beautiful in itself. We were changed by Camden, we grew from it and drew strength from it. It taught us to schedule cooking in a way that preserved freshness when we scaled up three times, to stay with the home-cooking way even as we saw others making short-cuts, to serve more food with fewer people. It taught us to run a stall entirely by ourself, from packing to sheltering from rain. The menu was DIY, the stall may have looked makeshift and rough, but the bread was more airy and crusty than the week before, the pate spread was always warm and tasty. You could smell the BBQ pork a few stalls away and everyone who tried our sample nodded and smiled.
The most important lesson for us was that we may move, we may change displays, we may redesign the stall, we may finally find a way to physically express how we feel, but we must not lose ourself when it comes to the heart of what we do – banh mi. The food must never be be changed and the taste must never be compromised. When you try our banh mi in Broadway or anywhere else, you should get the same experience at the first bite. The bread should always be warm, the pate should always be peppery and soft, the pickles should always be rightly balanced between sweet, salty and sour flavors.
There are moments when we look at each other and wonder why we do any of this, whether it matters to anyone. But somehow, it still matters to us. And what we did at Camden, we will do again and again and again, until we find that right place, right crowd, and right timing for magic to happen.
This weekend was so rainy and exhausting, but this song brought sun shine to our days.
Bánhmì11 is proud to present as far as we know the one-and-only song about banh mi.
Music and lyrics by Rob Findel, pencil by Daniel Raid and photos by Springy and Phuong Nguyen.
You & Mi- The Vietnamese Baguette Song
Banh banh banh
Mi mi mi mi
I’m more delicious than you would’ve imagined
I have been all around the world
I’ve been waiting for someone to take me
And realize that I’m much more than you would’ve heard
Mi mi mi mi
Banh banh banh
Mi mi mi mi
I wanna make love to your senses
What you are sensing is not a dream
I’m just so happy to be in your system
There is no place I would rather be
Pop-up Bánhmì11 stall in Camden Lock Market, Saturdays and Sundays from 24 October to 8 November, 2009
For a while we have been wondering about this show
In our heads picturing how it will flow
Looks to us like we have gathered a team
Can we not make it come true then, this dream?
So last week the way things turned out
Is that “Go West” is what it is all about
At Camden making banh mi together we will try
To see if spreading our wings we can really fly
Alone we are not sure we can stand this test
But so far luck has brought us to work with the best
A Spring from the South brings the beauty of photography
And a friend from years past marked us in digital geography
Three trading sessions mean several times more food
Can we cook all that fresh and maintain a good mood?
Oh goodness and how do we deal with the stall display?
With the big boys, is this really a gamble we can play?
All these questions are still spinning in our mind
But our guts tell us this chance is one of a kind
Faith is what we need, with our hearts to believe
And indeed with hard work, succcess, together we shall conceive!
P/S: This is what we call a ”frog poem” in Vietnamese
For Bánhmì11, cooking is a means to an end, eating.
One of the biggest difference in running a stall selling food, compared to let’s say, organic soaps, is that you spend a lot of time preparing. It may seem obvious but for some reason, but it did not click to us when we started out, just how much cooking we will be doing for one day’s trading. First we started cooking on Friday night, then we started on Thursday and now we start on Tuesday.
Cooking in Bánhmì11’s kitchen is a slow and painstaking process, from the rhythmic beat of mortar and pestle pounding spices together to the whistle of the pressure cooker as the steaming hot container is lifted out and into a cold water bath. There is no short cut, just a string of small movements that must be followed meticulously. The recipe is a blue print, but cooking means looking away from the written words and at what’s stirring in the pot, what’s browning in the oven, and touching the tenderness of the meat, the crunchiness of the vegetables, the softness of tofu and mushroom, and feeling the heat of the pan, the coolness of fresh water, and smelling the scent of cinnamon simmering in red wine. It’s a sensory experience that is all consuming, that asks for your full focus and attention, that intertwines the mind and the heart and the body, like playing an instrument, in this case literally with pots and pans.
But cooking would be so easy if it was so soothing all the time. The truth is cooking is tiring – perhaps the last bastion of manual labor. Rolling pork takes strong hands, cutting out kilos of fat takes stamina, and standing up all day gives you a sore back. It’s exasperating, like that week when we went through twenty-three iterations of making pate to find the right recipe and reach the right texture. And sometimes it’s terrifying, like when we turned off the wrong stove and burned the chicken the night before market day, and had to start all over again. It’s an odd human triumph in the fight to keep food from perishing. It’s nature’s measure of its power, of showing you surprises and reflecting your most honest state of mind. It’s so difficult to cook a good meal when you are tired, or angry, or bitter and bored and it’s so effortless for food to taste good when you are unburdened and untroubled.
So the reason you cook, apart from satisfying a twice-a-day necessity to stay alive, is because you care. And usually it extends beyond yourself, since one rarely bothers to cook just for oneself. Our moms always complain but then they cook again every day, each meal as elaborate as the last one, in solitary silence except for the spinning of the ventilating fan. It’s not so much what’s enjoyed over the stove as what’s relished at the table. This is the one hour in the day when we sit together and chat. So in a way, cooking is always an act of preparation, of getting ready for something more intimate, more sharing and receiving.
Cooking is also about growing, and becoming independent, both as a literal act of being capable of feeding oneself, and metaphorically about coming out of the shadow of a parent. Almost every food memory starts with a matriarch figure, the mother or grandmother, stirring and sweating in a dim, hot kitchen, and you tugging at their feet, nearly invisible in a hurried chaos. And as we grow up, we move from the sink, peeling root vegetables and washing leaves, to the stove, mixing and blanching and concocting. This is where the transformation happens, where ingredients become dish, plants become nutrition and little girls become women.
When you are in the business of cooking, the pressure surmounts. The mistakes are hard to be forgiven. But the pleasure is the same, some of it is in cooking and most of it is in serving our food. In seeing customers’ reactions, in meeting people who come back to order more, in watching people share a Vietnamese baguette for the first time, in hearing our banh mi become a conversation topic, in knowing that the stall is a place to get together. That’s when food gains its soul, through the life that’s breathed in by the people who make it and the people who eat it.
That’s perhaps when we meet eye-to-eye over the counter not as roles, vendor and customers, but as persons, with first names. When we hear the longing for conversation in the voice of the middle-aged woman who comes at the end of the day, asking about the difference between artichoke and ginger and ginseng teas. When we catch a glimpse of curiosity in the child who stretches his arm toward the banh mi in the cart’s glass window, as his parent is dragging him away. When we watch people holding their banh mi warm in their hands, pulling it up from the baguette bag, pressing the bread together, examining and smelling before taking their first bite.
We love cooking. But we don’t love it because of the recipes, or the ingredients, or how aesthetically pleasing it is (which by the way is not always true, especially when you cooking with fresh liver and pork belly). We love cooking because we get to eat, and other people get to eat, and that in itself is a joyful and beautiful thing. Now there will be a pile of dishes to be washed, utensils to be cleaned and the floor to be mopped. And we can’t keep track of whether we just cooked for twenty people or a hundred and twenty and we just know that the endless cycle restarts every week. But still the sound of the crusty bread cracking in our hands, the succulent flavors of pate and roast pork and crunchy carrots, excite and satisfy us every time. We suppose that momentary sensation happens to every one, at least once, that’s why they come back. We certainly hope so.
How Bánhmì11 celebrated our first Mid-autumn in London
Saturday was possibly the windiest day thus far this year. It also happened to be the eighth full moon of the lunar calendar and to celebrate Trung Thu, the Mid-autumn festival, Bánhmì11 put together our first event. Blocking the wind from the stall with two trolleys, shielding the oven and gas stove with a large collapsed carton box, we wondered if the wind would really let us keep the food warm. Rob had put double-weight under the umbrellas and double-clipped them next to each other, like connecting compartments in a beehive. When a big wind blew over, the entire construction shook, we retreated into the back of our collars and everyone froze for a moment, but despite the occasional pause; the strings held, the umbrellas withstood the wind and the stall continued its rhythmic activities until the end of the day. In the gusty wind, barely warm enough with our scarves, we put up decorations and the lanterns hung from pole to pole, like fragments of our childhood memories lingering under the London sky.
When we were children, Trung Thu was a time to make up with the kid who stole your pencil, to be out in the neighborhood and play tag all day, to forget about doing chores, to ask for our cousins to sleep over, and to stay up really late watching the moon. For weeks, we would have been picking out our lanterns, trading them with the other children, pleading with aunties and uncles to buy us yet another star-shaped one, with just the right color combination, lots of glitter, and lots of trimmings. When night falls, we lit our lanterns and went around our small alleys singing Mid-autumn songs, proud and loud like a well-rehearsed marching band, raising our lanterns toward the sky, or moving them on the ground so they spinned, wearing animal face masks and beating enthusiastically on drums. Under the moonlight, it was a spellbinding show and we participated with such intentional preparation, such ritualistic seriousness and such energetic excitement that made Mid-autumn night truly magical. Growing up and going away from home, all these activities have faded away but the one thing that remains is that whenever possible, we always eat mooncake and this simple act alone, is enough to remember the spirit of Trung Thu. Before Saturday, we couldn’t eat any of the mooncakes, saving them for big day but we went back and forth over debating which type is really the best- shiny crispy golden banh nuong, or gooey white glutinous rice banh deo, and compounding our conundrum trying to figure out which combination of fillings is the tastiest, mung bean and lotus seed, or coconut and sesame, or egg yolk and sausage. On the day, we cut the mooncakes into small pieces, the way old people usually take them with tea, and shared them around. Perhaps the pastries looked a bit strange, if you haven’t seen them before, but for us last Saturday was as an authentic taste of Trung Thu as you could have ever tried.
No one knows when Mid-autumn became a children’s festival in the Far East, just like how Halloween is the most exciting event for children in the West. Somehow, when we tried to remember what growing up was like, those Mid-autumn nights always came to mind as the most vivid, magical moments and we kept walking down memory lane searching for more. In the colorful fabric of our childhoods, the songs, the lanterns, the stories of Trung Thu were the uncanny threads that stringed the years together. Because of this, we wanted to organize Trung Thu as an early Halloween, to share some of our joys growing up with the lovely children who visit our stall. We noticed that there are a lot of children who visit our stall, but often times they are left out of what we have to offer. They are not allowed to drink coffee and they eat bánh mì with only butter or pate. This was an occasion for us to spoil them with sweet moon cakes, colorful lanterns and fun animal face masks to share and play with others. As for treating the grown-ups, there was plenty of xoi xeo sticky rice, summer rolls goi cuon and chicken salad with Vietnamese herbs that our fabulous girlfriends helped making the night before. The only trouble was that we run out of food too early, so hopefully you got there in time for some mooncake!
London weather has a way of making mid-autumn seem almost like mid-winter, and we could see the soup taking longer to heat up and the bread growing cold and hard more quickly. But being amidst the hanging lanterns, seeing the children at the stall running around with their masks, we were reminded of how as children, we took everything around us more seriously than ourselves, believing in the things our eyes never saw, and through our imagination, every mindless thing came to life. Looking at the moon on Mid-autumn night, we really saw a boy sitting under a big banyan tree, looking down on us, just like the legend has it. We wish that somehow, for ourselves and those who work with us, looking forward and upward, we can see a vision of Bánhmì11 with the same childlike conviction and clarity, and together, we can turn it into a reality.
Fun in the sun, homegrown food in Havana and other memories from Bánhmì11’s holiday to the jewel of the Caribbean.
The sails are up, raised proudly toward the vertical midday sun. In the cool breeze, they flutter like red and orange butterflies and our catamaran glides on the turquoise blue sea, powerful and yet graceful like a dancer leaping on air and touching the ground for only brief moments. On one side we see miles of glittering white sands, dry palm thatched beach umbrellas and red brick roofs. Here and there are groups of people, small and interspersed like miniature figurines in a toy box, ready to be picked up and played with by the chubby hands of children looking for amusement. On the other side, stretching toward the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, is the sea, the serene, sparkling, blue and infinite sea. At the back steering the catamaran is our captain Rudolpho, singing old Spanish ballads and intermittently yelling “ca map”, God knows where this half Cuban, half Russian man picked up this Vietnamese word for shark, which gets us every time looking at each other bewildered, and then bursting out laughing. Life here, for a moment, really seems like a beach.
Cocooned within the realms on the resorts, first in Varadero and then on Cayo Santa Maria, our days took on a happy routine, full of physical activities and magical moments. We would get up at seven and head straight to the sea for a morning swim. The beach is almost always empty at this time and the sun is just rising, sparing us of the scorching heat of the rest of the day. The morning sea is spectacular – the sand is smooth, the waves are gentle, the seabed is sloped and shallow, the water is warm, not too salty, and underneath the clear surface, small silver fish swim at our feet, apparently undisturbed and perhaps even entertained by splashing humans. After swimming, we would snorkel around the nearby reef, walk along the beach, take salsa lessons on the terrace, go along with aquagym in the pool (Cuban style, which means a lot of touching, massaging and even squeezing other people’s nose), or simply lazy around on a beach chair with a book.
Sometimes we would break our routine for something more interesting, like going scuba diving from the Las Brujas marina. Our diving instructor was very charming, in that Latin way which means that he is on autopilot for flirting when in front of girls. We had barely sat down on the bus when he announced “I am going to marry one of you three…” and with a spontaneous decisiveness, he pointed at the the one of the us who sat closest to him and concluded with utmost conviction “You!”. We just bursted out laughing, which was probably a good thing because we were quite nervous. It rained the night before and the sky was all low gray clouds. Our boat looked like a rustic fisherman’s operation, with the exception of two rows of oxygen tanks along the sides. By the time we arrived near the coral and anchored, the boat was rocking violently amidst the heavy winds and strong waves. As we put our wet suits on, people started to throw up and were seasick even underwater. We were not in the calm Caribbean waters of Varadero but the mighty Atlantic ocean around Santa Maria. The seabed was shallow but visibility was poor. I held on tight to the hand of my partner, thirty-two year old IT engineer Alberto from Barcelona, whom we had only met a few moments ago. On land he was a complete stranger to me, but under water I held on to him as if my life depended on it. Without the sun, the corals looked not like the colorful underwater world of Ariel the mermaid, but a rugged prairie of yellow-green, willowy high grass. But the fish were very pretty; we saw big purple fish, small silver and yellow fish, octopus and even baby barracudas, long and slim like a knife. The flora and fauna could have been more interesting, but we were content with how well we did underwater, enduring two immersions of forty-five minutes each, and some of us emerging with still a quarter tank of oxygen left. No mean feat for three beginner uncertified divers in the Atlantic currents.
Now one can not travel without experiencing the food. In the resorts, food was unimaginative but abundant and we stuffed ourselves full three times a day. There was always a huge buffet in the main restaurant with everything you expect of a fancy cafeteria. And in addition there were at least three more sit-down restaurants, from romantic seafood criollo by the beach to steakhouse with air conditioning and white table cloths, and then there was the snack bar, the pool bar, the pizzeria, the ice cream parlor and the beer garden, all of which are dangerously enough included in the stay.
Back in Havana, we realized Cuba was the first place we travelled to where we wished we brought snacks along, more than when we were on road trip to Tibet or on safari in Kenya without refrigeration for weeks. Strolling the street of San Rafael near the Capitolio, we found out that the longest queues were not for the best restaurants, but the ration shops where people lined up with their tickets and stamps for the daily bread. There were oranges peeled with a peculiar machine, hot pizza being sold through the bars of a living room window, and pound cake with a top layer of creme caramel by the sidewalk, and soft ice being sold to Cuban children at 3 pesos monedad nacional but ten times more expensive at 1 pesos convertibles to foreigners.
We stayed at one of Bánhmì11’s friends’ parents’ house at the enviable address of Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, in the enviable area of Miramar, with a view to the sea and a private guard around the clock. But even in this stately residence, her mother grows their own vegetables and fruits, because in Cuba, money does not cure the shortages and scarcity of basic food stuffs. There was coconut, papaya, mango and orange trees in the garden. When we cooked squash and spinach, she went out to pick them as the water was boiling. When we steamed lobster, we went out searching for bushes of lemongrass and lime. Every week they travelled outside of Havana, all the way to the Matanzas countryside to local farms to buy chicken, eggs and milk, which we pasteurized at home by boiling and skimming out the cream. The rice we ate was carried in hand luggage from Mexico and there were three American sized fridges in the house, where everything from meat, mushrooms, to tomatoes and mangoes were frozen and stored for gradual consumption.
We ate with a guilty conscience, that perhaps this sumptuous meal was depleting the subsistent garden, that we did not know how long all this food had been saved up for us, that other people were making long trips in the heat so that we could have a smoothie in the morning. But although guilt may have crossed our minds, our stomachs were so satisfied and our hearts truly happy. Everything tasted so good, so fresh, so fragrant; the way organically grown, local, real, just-picked-from-the-earth food is supposed to taste, the way we remembered food tasted like when we grew up in Vietnam before pesticides and growth hormones became so available. We cooked simple dishes, fish soup with tomatoes and tamarind, minced pork sauteed with green onions, and they were more flavorful than the elaborate five-course meals we sometimes ate at home. Bananas were sweet from ripening on the tree and papayas were huge, with a layer of moss outside their skin but firm and fresh on the inside. We still had an appetite in the hot climate and we loved everything we ate, savoring each bite, enjoying each spoonful, not minding the preparing, cooking, dish washing (with a disintegrated sponge) cycle that repeated every few hours, from breakfast to dinner.
Outside of the home and when rationing is not a problem, Cubans showed how they really knew how to cook. Using a mix of very poor Spanish and English, we asked the staff at two hotels nearby for a good paladar, which is a private restaurant in a private residence, as opposed to the state-run restaurants and resorts we ate at for the most part of our trip. We were unanimously recommended to La Fontana, a place only a few blocks down where we lived. London has the underground restaurant scene, and Havana has the paladar scene, both acts of turning the mainstream food on its head and bringing it back into the private home. On the menu was ropa vieja made from lamb, which we did not have the courage to try but went instead for the tomatoes stuffed with crab and avocado, the fillet mignon special and the grilled red snapper special. The food was imaginative, but showing real reverence for the ingredients – from the crisp tomatoes to the ripe and melting avocado to the tender beef- exposing their flavors and leaving their tastes lingering in our mouths long after we have eaten.
Perhaps more importantly, all the staff was always smiling. The waiter was attentive without being intrusive. The sommelier was knowledgeable without showing off. The band approached our table and asked to play music, which meant that we should tip, without being hustling. And as the drummer played the favorite tune of our trip, “Chan chan”, on his bongo, his head was turned around to gaze at Shakira’s bedroom eyes on the screen, which made us smile too. Cuban men, they make no pretense for checking us out by the pool, whistling to us from their truck, crying out from the divider of the road for us to come and join them for beer, and blowing kisses everywhere. But we could laugh it off as they were not vulgar, not weird, just really friendly, really fun. No wonder the women here walk with their head tall, their clothes tight, their heels high and their behind shaking from side to side like they are dancing on a catwalk.
People speak about Cuba and the embargo in the same breath, with a tone of resentment, and pity. But rather selfishly, somehow we saw Cuba’s reluctance to be swept along the wind of change, the chase for prosperity, the race for global competitiveness in some aspects as a blessing for the island. Life here is certainly not glitzy, but the arts blossom. We saw amazing flamenco and salsa and Cuban son, where the dancers were graceful and daring like acrobats, sensual and colorful like carnival paraders. We heard music everywhere, even in the non-tourist quarters of Havana Vieja, where children beat plastic bottles against carton boxes to make the most amazing tunes. We rummaged the arts market and saw an impressive collection on Goya-like bursts of color in oil on canvas, somber black and white portraits of Che and contemporary images of Havana superimposed onto each other into collages. Life here is certainly not full of surpluses, but people are ingenuous with what they have. Plastic bags are washed and dried for reuse, water bottles are never thrown away and used as containers for everything, a plastic colander replaces bin liners and a plate works as cling film to cover food, trash bags are teared up to use in place of tape and sometimes when you really need it, even… condom rings substitute for rubber bands.
The supermarket shelves are empty but people have access to good healthcare. They are not obese, not diabetic and learned to dance, to swim before they could walk. The television has three or four channels of old documentary films but at night people gather around the Malecon, the 8-kilometer long promenade along the sea, watching the sunset, basking in the fresh breeze. Visiting the small village of Cojimar outside of Havana, tracing the footsteps of Hemingway for the thirty years he lived in Cuba, we imagined life here has not changed very much since he left.
Siting in darkness in the white wedding gazebo by the beach, looking up to the starry sky and half moon, listening to nothing but the sound of the waves, we felt like time stopped. We love Cuba because for the ten days that we were there, it turned a bunch of internet-addicts into active people who did not miss facebook, emails, text messaging or even phone calls. It taught us the simple pleasures of moving our hips and legs like we actually can hear a rhyme in our heads, and enjoying the constant companionship of each other without rescheduling to meet up for months. It taught us that t it was okay to smile to strangers who blow kisses at you from a truck, to get up on stage and dance along in the lime light, to breathe underwater while you are throwing up on your regulator. It taught us that it was possible to look great without having ever heard of any designer brand, to make exquisite food from simple ingredients, to listen to thoughts in our heads instead of always finding distractions, to find joy in introspection.
Cuba is easy to love, because we had a choice, to like it and return or hate it and leave. If given a choice between the makeshift plastic and carton jukebox and a computer game, between the street pizza through the window bars and the supermarket frozen meal, between slow moving serenity and the hectic but no-queues life, we can not tell which path Cuba would choose. One thing we do know, however, is that instead of feeling sad for the Cuban people, the way we feel many times traveling through the developing world, we feel envious of this gorgeous, dignified, smiling, and passionate people.
They say Cuba awaits imminent change, that you should go while the legacy is still intact, the way you should visit Tibet before the railroad came or Antarctica before the polar caps melt or South Pacific islands before they submerge. To us, Cuba did seem fragile, but only in that humorous way that a perfect day at the beach may be wrecked by the rain, a perfect meal may be ruined by biting mosquitoes, a perfect mojitos may be thwarted without the yerba buena. Sometimes somethings are too good to hide in memories…and that’s why we will keep coming back for more. Viva Cuba y Hasta Luego!
We are on the plane now, heading first to La Habana, Varadero and then wherever else reading Lonely Planet on the plane may inspire us to do. Having planned this trip before we started making bánh mì, we passed our friends the baton to pick up and run with Bánhmì11 for a couple of weeks. When we started out, we thought it was going to be a solitary exercise. We had had it in our heads for so long that we forgot other people might be thinking the same way. But as Bánhmì11 has grown, it has taken a life of its own, drawing in people with a magnetic pull that exceed the sum of our personal charisma.
People come to Bánhmì11 and make a contribution in different ways. Some come on Wednesdays to help with the initial preparation of the meat and pate. Some come on Fridays to help with cooking in the evening and stay over to Saturday mornings to help us finish up. Some come to the stall to take pictures for the photoblog. Some help us with concept for the website and photo shoots. Everyone generously give their time, thoughts and creativity. Bánhmì11 has somehow become a voice, a quiet nudging to move beyond preparing for the next big thing in life to doing the small things that matter now, holding on to each other even when we may be stumbling every step of the way. We met a friend of friends on the train to a wedding in Wales this weekend and we started talking about bring weekly specials to Bánhmì11. We met up last night at Viet Grill for a special treat of off-menu dining and discussed a collaboration for a photo shoot, with a professional model/ actor whom we have only met twice. Almost strangers as we may be to each other, our stories were similar. Bánhmì11 envelops our conversations and gets under our skin even in our sleep. Every post we write, every photo we take, everyone debate we have over the future of Bánhmì11, is a collaborative act of self-expression, of wanting to explode the boundaries. Perhaps it is about challenging the notion of choosing between a career that makes money and one that makes a difference, where we have made a compromise but our friends are about calling out the out-dated stereotypes about a country and a people, or about pacifying an unsatiated appetite for good food and good company.
As we leave our friends the weight of keeping Bánhmì11 alive and running for the next two weeks, we are not unaware of the joys it brings and the shadows it casts on their lives. There will be times when they juggle to finish what they do at work and what they do for Bánhmì11, when they struggle to do more on less sleep, when they risk our friendship over an idea, when their hands and feet are tired and they must not sit down because then the fatigue really hits them. And hopefully, there will also be times when they smile over a problem solved, when they sigh a sigh of relief over the food that taste as it should, when they bubble with excitement over the faces that they recognize.
At the wedding this weekend, the mother of the bride made a speech that brought tears to our eyes. She asked the in-laws to take care of her daughter because she does not live in the UK, to embrace her with her flaws, to love her as part of the family. Now that we leave Bánhmì11 in the trusty hands of our friends this week, we ask you to give them the same support and guidance you have given us. Maybe they will make mistakes that we can all learn from. Maybe they will make improvements that change the direction we move in. As always though, enjoy Bánhmì11 for what it is and we will be thinking of you all, with lots of love from Cuba!
DOUBLE-SHIFT THIS WEEKEND (22-23/5): BROADWAY ON SATURDAY AS USUAL AND PRIMROSE HILL MAY FETE ON SUNDAY
Maybe we are finally escaping these rainy and cold weeks. The weather looks warm this weekend and Broadway will hopefully be full of lovely people again. On Sunday, Regent's Park Road will be closed for the Primrose Hill May Fete (check the event on Facebook). We are doing a special: caramelized pork with pickled green mustard (they are organic, we picked them ourselves!). If the gods allow, maybe we can even put together some cool summer drinks for you to test (don't know if they are good enough for Broadway Market yet, just testing recipes for now!)
IMPROVED OP-LA-DI STEAK BANH MI
Improving on our "limited edition" banh mi, best British sirloin (new! better tasting!) in a soy and sake marinade, served with an organic sunny side up egg, all cooked to order! Op La Di, Op La Da...Lala how the life goes on! Lala come before it's all gone!!
WE ARE IN OUR BRAND NEW STALL
Starting last Saturday 6 March we have moved to a new stall! We are near the Regent's Canal end, next to John the Breadman and opposite of Violet Cupcakes. Just follow the scent of Imperial BBQ!
Saturday was possibly the windiest day thus far this year. It also happened to be the eighth full moon of the lunar calendar and to celebrate Trung Thu, the Mid-autumn festival, Bánhmì11 put together our first event. Blocking the wind from the stall with two trolleys, shielding the oven and gas stove with a large collapsed carton box, we wondered if the wind would really let us keep the food warm. Rob had put double-weight under the umbrellas and double-clipped them next to each other, like connecting compartments in a beehive. When a big wind blew over, the entire construction shook, we retreated into the back of our collars and everyone froze for a moment, but despite the occasional pause; the strings held, the umbrellas withstood the wind and the stall continued its rhythmic activities until the end of the day. In the gusty wind, barely warm enough with our scarves, we put up decorations and the lanterns hung from pole to pole, like fragments of our childhood memories lingering under the London sky.
Growing up and going away from home, all these activities have faded away but the one thing that remains is that whenever possible, we always eat mooncake and this simple act alone, is enough to remember the spirit of Trung Thu. Before Saturday, we couldn’t eat any of the mooncakes, saving them for big day but we went back and forth over debating which type is really the best- shiny crispy golden banh nuong, or gooey white glutinous rice banh deo, and compounding our conundrum trying to figure out which combination of fillings is the tastiest, mung bean and lotus seed, or coconut and sesame, or egg yolk and sausage. On the day, we cut the mooncakes into small pieces, the way old people usually take them with tea, and shared them around. Perhaps the pastries looked a bit strange, if you haven’t seen them before, but for us last Saturday was as an authentic taste of Trung Thu as you could have ever tried.
No one knows when Mid-autumn became a children’s festival in the Far East, just like how Halloween is the most exciting event for children in the West. Somehow, when we tried to remember what growing up was like, those Mid-autumn nights always came to mind as the most vivid, magical moments and we kept walking down memory lane searching for more. In the colorful fabric of our childhoods, the songs, the lanterns, the stories of Trung Thu were the uncanny threads that stringed the years together. Because of this, we wanted to organize Trung Thu as an early Halloween, to share some of our joys growing up with the lovely children who visit our stall. We noticed that there are a lot of children who visit our stall, but often times they are left out of what we have to offer. They are not allowed to drink coffee and they eat bánh mì with only butter or pate. This was an occasion for us to spoil them with sweet moon cakes, colorful lanterns and fun animal face masks to share and play with others. As for treating the grown-ups, there was plenty of xoi xeo sticky rice, summer rolls goi cuon and chicken salad with Vietnamese herbs that our fabulous girlfriends helped making the night before. The only trouble was that we run out of food too early, so hopefully you got there in time for some mooncake!
London weather has a way of making mid-autumn seem almost like mid-winter, and we could see the soup taking longer to heat up and the bread growing cold and hard more quickly. But being amidst the hanging lanterns, seeing the children at the stall running around with their masks, we were reminded of how as children, we took everything around us more seriously than ourselves, believing in the things our eyes never saw, and through our imagination, every mindless thing came to life. Looking at the moon on Mid-autumn night, we really saw a boy sitting under a big banyan tree, looking down on us, just like the legend has it. We wish that somehow, for ourselves and those who work with us, looking forward and upward, we can see a vision of Bánhmì11 with the same childlike conviction and clarity, and together, we can turn it into a reality.
Sometimes we would break our routine for something more interesting, like going scuba diving from the Las Brujas marina. Our diving instructor was very charming, in that Latin way which means that he is on autopilot for flirting when in front of girls. We had barely sat down on the bus when he announced “I am going to marry one of you three…” and with a spontaneous decisiveness, he pointed at the the one of the us who sat closest to him and concluded with utmost conviction “You!”. We just bursted out laughing, which was probably a good thing because we were quite nervous. It rained the night before and the sky was all low gray clouds. Our boat looked like a rustic fisherman’s operation, with the exception of two rows of oxygen tanks along the sides. By the time we arrived near the coral and anchored, the boat was rocking violently amidst the heavy winds and strong waves. As we put our wet suits on, people started to throw up and were seasick even underwater. We were not in the calm Caribbean waters of Varadero but the mighty Atlantic ocean around Santa Maria. The seabed was shallow but visibility was poor. I held on tight to the hand of my partner, thirty-two year old IT engineer Alberto from Barcelona, whom we had only met a few moments ago. On land he was a complete stranger to me, but under water I held on to him as if my life depended on it. Without the sun, the corals looked not like the colorful underwater world of Ariel the mermaid, but a rugged prairie of yellow-green, willowy high grass. But the fish were very pretty; we saw big purple fish, small silver and yellow fish, octopus and even baby barracudas, long and slim like a knife. The flora and fauna could have been more interesting, but we were content with how well we did underwater, enduring two immersions of forty-five minutes each, and some of us emerging with still a quarter tank of oxygen left. No mean feat for three beginner uncertified divers in the Atlantic currents.
Now one can not travel without experiencing the food. In the resorts, food was unimaginative but abundant and we stuffed ourselves full three times a day. There was always a huge buffet in the main restaurant with everything you expect of a fancy cafeteria. And in addition there were at least three more sit-down restaurants, from romantic seafood criollo by the beach to steakhouse with air conditioning and white table cloths, and then there was the snack bar, the pool bar, the pizzeria, the ice cream parlor and the beer garden, all of which are dangerously enough included in the stay.
Back in Havana, we realized Cuba was the first place we travelled to where we wished we brought snacks along, more than when we were on road trip to Tibet or on safari in Kenya without refrigeration for weeks. Strolling the street of San Rafael near the Capitolio, we found out that the longest queues were not for the best restaurants, but the ration shops where people lined up with their tickets and stamps for the daily bread. There were oranges peeled with a peculiar machine, hot pizza being sold through the bars of a living room window, and pound cake with a top layer of creme caramel by the sidewalk, and soft ice being sold to Cuban children at 3 pesos monedad nacional but ten times more expensive at 1 pesos convertibles to foreigners.
We stayed at one of Bánhmì11’s friends’ parents’ house at the enviable address of Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, in the enviable area of Miramar, with a view to the sea and a private guard around the clock. But even in this stately residence, her mother grows their own vegetables and fruits, because in Cuba, money does not cure the shortages and scarcity of basic food stuffs. There was coconut, papaya, mango and orange trees in the garden. When we cooked squash and spinach, she went out to pick them as the water was boiling. When we steamed lobster, we went out searching for bushes of lemongrass and lime. Every week they travelled outside of Havana, all the way to the Matanzas countryside to local farms to buy chicken, eggs and milk, which we pasteurized at home by boiling and skimming out the cream. The rice we ate was carried in hand luggage from Mexico and there were three American sized fridges in the house, where everything from meat, mushrooms, to tomatoes and mangoes were frozen and stored for gradual consumption.
