Bánh mì and the city

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.

Posted on: 16.08.2009