A tale of two Banh Mi

The first I heard of Banh Mi was on the forum where I first met Jim, Brian, Andrew, and Josh. The forum wasn’t food based, but we did talk about food a lot. I was surprised that there was a Vietnamese delicacy with which I was not familiar.

Australia has a very large Vietnamese population, almost all post 1975. I remember the first restaurant opening in Canberra at my local shops in the mid 70s, and the bloke who opened it is still in the restaurant game. It’s long been a favourite haunt, though it moved around. So for the last couple of years, I’ve been intrigued about Banh Mi. Interestingly there didn’t seem to be a lot of the very strong French influence in the Vietnamese food I experienced, and the Saigon-style bakery has only risen to prominence in the last 10 years, and it’s done it without the existence of the Banh Mi. I’ve been trawling the internet looking for some hint to suggest that most refugees in Australia didn’t come from the French dominated areas of South Vietnam, but the only thing I can come up with is that a lot of the refugees were ethnically Chinese…hmm… not conclusive, but perhaps explains the lack of Saigon bakery goods?

Anyway, back to the sandwich in question… I found out pretty fast from my imaginary friends (I hadn’t met any of them yet) that the Banh Mi revolved around a crusty baguette style roll, stuffed liberally with meat (usually pork) and salad ingredients. Also chilli (lots of chilli) and pate! Sounding good so far. I began my quest in vain. None to be found in my locality.

Then about a year ago, maybe more, a little franchise called Roll’d opened in the food court of the big mall here. I wandered past one day and was intrigued. I tried their Pho, and was reasonably impressed, but not overly, and then on another occasion, their Banh Mi. Again not wildly impressed. It seemed overly large and bready and while flavourful, just a bit uninspiring. About a month ago, I noticed that all the way across town there was a hole-in-the wall place at another shopping centre, and I mentally bookmarked it. Fast forward to the beginning of this month and Jim announcing the List sandwiches for this month “Banh Mi” I thought “I could do a compare and contrast of those two places”.

Jim poked me on Twitter a couple of days ago to ask if I was going to attempt to write about any of the List sandwiches for the month, and I was spurred into action.

Today, I got up bright and early and went to the gym. I needed to burn some calories in advance to enact my plan for the day. I’ll need to burn some after the fact too, so it’s lucky I’ve got a 10k fun run planned for Sunday. I decided to head for the place I hadn’t tried before, and arrived right on midday to find a queue of fluro shirts out the door of the place. There’s a building site across the road, and apparently all the building site bogans have discovered the joys of Banh Mi. The bloke behind the counter asked for my order in a broad ocker accent (they’re listed as ‘Saigon Rolls’ with an explanation of the fillings) and I opted for pork “Chilli or no chilli?” “Definitely chilli :-)” I could see the sandwich being made, and was slightly alarmed at the sight of some fairly wild looking manufactured meat, but decided to Be Alert but not Alarmed. My sandwich cost me $6 (which is pretty cheap for around these parts), and I took it away to my car to eat in peace.

My first thought was “Wow! Flavour from the carrots! Crusty, chewy bread. Coriander! Chilli!” and I ate enthusiastically.

You can see here the slightly scary manufactured meat look on the bottom of the sandwich. There was a slice of red rimmed pork, a slice of something paler, and a slice of something really weird…

But it was all pretty good, and I ate it.

On completion of the eating of the sandwich I suddenly realised that I *could* do a compare and contrast of the two sandwiches on the same day. So I started the car and headed for town. Stopping only to buy coffee beans on the way, I went to Roll’d and started asking questions of the (very Anglo) bloke behind the counter “what’s in your Banh Mi?” he rattled off the now familiar list of ingredients, and said “and pate, depending on which one you order” “Oh, which ones *have* pate?” “The pork ones” “Excellent. I’ll have the pork with crackling please”. This sandwich set me back $9.50 (ouch) and came with one of those weird buzzer things that tell you when your food is ready, which it turns out, is almost redundant. It was really quick.

This was a bigger sandwich (ooof, and I’ve already eaten one, remember?) and much more stuffed…

The pork was in recognisable chunks, and the crackling was liberally scattered along the open edge. Visible globules of mayo and pate. This sandwich is almost too big to get my mouth around. It was a much messier affair than the first version, and much greasier. My memory is clearly at fault because this thing was great! While I was eating the first sandwich, I was really happy with it, but as soon as I tasted the second, my heart was lost to it. Actually though, if I were going to eat Banh Mi on a regular basis, I’d go for the first, as the second is just too intense for every day eating, I reckon. It was great, but huge. Oh, and the chillis were not very hot. I’d ask for more next time.

Delicious sweet and sour carrots, cucumber and coriander. It almost beat me, but I soldiered on. I had a job to do, and by God, I was going to do it.

It was great. I loved it. I definitely wouldn’t want to eat more than one in a day again, but it was worth doing once.

Crit

I’m a mother of two boys. I work selling organic produce to gullible locals, and in my spare time I run as far as I can. Oh, and I live in Australia, married to a US citizen.