Lovin' mouthfuls

Bánh mì is best enjoyed when shared with friends.

Friday night past 10pm and the heat is on in Bánhmì11‘s kitchen. With all four burners in use, the pate is entering its forth hour and slowly simmering into a cohesive mass. The carrot and daikon radish are julienned and the cabbage is shredded. Squeezing brine out of them, the limes’ sourness and the chili’s spiciness pierce through my gloves and leave a burning sensation on my fingers. The handful of vegetables shrinks to fit neatly inside my palms. But my pickle, deemed not dry enough, is promptly formed into a ball and squeezed again by bà Trinh.

The pate is cooled and we nervously flip it over. As we lift the container, the pate slowly releases the edges and slides off nicely like a cake. With a lack of control not dissimilar to baking, there is no turning back as you can not fix the texture or taste of pate once it has been cooked. With the hours invested in the final product and trying to make everything as fresh as possible, we really don’t have a margin for error.

When people ask us how our bánh mì is so different than any other places, we think this is the reason. We spend a lot more time cooking the resolutely old-fashioned, family-made way. The flavors seem to speak for themselves as by 2:40pm on Saturday we were sold out of all bánh mì. When we ordered double of the number of baguettes from our baker this week, we thought we might be stuck with quite a few left over to eat until the beginning of next week. But the queues just kept forming and we couldn’t make bánh mì fast enough.

We introduced a vegetarian option, which was very well received. While you may have a difficult time finding a truly vegetarian meal in Vietnam, that is not cooked with lard or meat broth or fish sauce, there is wealth of wonderfully tasty dishes in the cooking of Buddhist monks. Drawing on this heritage, Bánhmì11 has created a vegetarian option where the complex juxtaposition of tastes, textures and temperatures in a traditional bánh mì is not lost. The softness of tenderly crumbled fresh tofu mingles with the crunchiness of black dry mushroom and glass noodles and even as an adamant carnivore, you may have a hard time resisting.

Icing on the cake this week was all our friends who showed up at Broadway Market. You came and you brought so many friends and family, or in some cases, your pet. You gave us many critical and honest comments, for which we are truly grateful. We couldn’t really chat but we hope you had a good time and experienced that same special feeling that we got when we came to Ca Phe VN stall the first time. We will make a few improvements next week, fine-tuning the made-to-order process and enhancing the recipe, so that we may be deserving of your support.

Posted on: 26.07.2009