Vietnamese vendor selling bánh mì, Nha Trang, Feb. 12, 2004. Tim Hall/Alamy
July 05, 2015
Adjacent to Nhà Thờ Đức Bà, Saigon’s Notre Dame Cathedral,
there was a kiosk that sold a favorite sandwich of my Vietnamese childhood.
Customers would travel far and wide for this delicious item, the bánh mì, which seemed stuffed with treasures
like an old lady’s bulging purse. It was an airy French baguette with a thin
crunchy crust that could contain a cornucopia of roast chicken or pork,
homemade pâté, cured ham, headcheese, a mélange of pickled daikon radish and
carrot, slices of cucumber and chili pepper, a generous sprinkling of cilantro
leaves, a few dashes of Maggi sauce, and a spread of mayonnaise (which, for
some reason, Vietnamese call bơ, which means butter). At once spicy,
salty, sour, savory, sweet, and aromatic: a bite into a bánh mì on a Saigon street was a moment of
rapture.
How could I have imagined
then, in wartime Vietnam, that bánh mì would one day become an international
sandwich sensation, a culinary wonder of our globalized age? It has spread from
Saigon to California and from there to the rest of the planet. Every city in
North America now has its own bánh mì shop or chain: Bánh Mì Saigon in New
York, Bun Mee in San Francisco, BONMi in Washington, DC, Bánh Mì Bá Get in
Chicago, Bánh Mì Boys in Toronto. Bánh mì is standard food truck fare from San
Diego to Boston. Yum! Brands, owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, and
Pizza Hut, has opened Bánh Shop fast-food outlets in Dallas. South of the
border in Mexico City is a bright red and yellow bánh mì food truck called Ñham Ñham. Shops
and chains have sprung up everywhere else; in London there is Kêu!, Bánhmì11,
and, next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, Banh Mi Bay. Among the options in Shanghai
is Mr. V, whose menu includes the Obscene Double Triple—bánh mì with headcheese, Vietnamese
sausage, and peppercorn terrine; in Singapore, you can try Bánh Mì 888; one of
the busiest in Tokyo is a place simply called Bánh Mì Sandwich.
The sandwich is sprouting in the fancier restaurants run
by top chefs, who are having fun taking bánh mì to more serious culinary
heights. Richard Landau, chef-owner of Vedge in Philadelphia, has brainstormed
the Quinoa Burger Bánh Mì. Denver’s No. 1 chef, Lon Symensma of Cho Lon, came
up with the idea of a deconstructed bánh mì spread across a charcuterie
board: duck terrine, foie gras, pickled daikon and carrot, and Chinese
mustard-mayonnaise with cilantro. Top chef Michael Voltaggio of ink. on Melrose
Avenue in Los Angeles offers two varieties, a veggie bánh mì with barbecued tofu and
mushroom spread, and a bánh mì with pork shoulder, bacon, chicharrónes, and onion
spread.
Non-Vietnamese chefs regularly reinterpret bánh mì on the Food Network, the queen
of American taste Martha Stewart teaches her viewers how to make it, upscale
Whole Foods supermarkets line it into their deli counters, and celebrity chefs
reveal their bánh mì
secrets in Food &
Wine and other culinary periodicals. Anthony Bourdain featured
bánh mì on his
No Reservations
program—typically, the clip showed the chef, author, and television personality
munching on a sandwich from a Hanoi street stall. The craze has inspired
countless blog sites, including one called Battle of the Bánh Mì: Finding, Feasting, & Making
Vietnamese Sandwiches. Foodies post dueling bánh mì recipes on websites like Blue
Apron and Epicurious. “You know your food is great when Americans sell it back
to you,” a friend of mine once quipped.
L’Indochine Française
Bánh mì’s
origins, as its architectural foundation indicates, are in France. The French
arrived in Vietnam initially as missionaries in the seventeenth century and
established colonial control of Vietnam in 1887 with the formation of La
Fédération Indochinoise. The French brought their language and their food,
including eventually the baguette, the long thin loaf of bread that became
popular in France in the early twentieth century. Growing up in Hanoi my
grandmother called it bánh tây,
literally Western-style bread. By the 1950s the Vietnamese started to tinker
with it and, signaling Vietnamese appropriation of the baguette, started
calling it bánh mì—simply,
wheat bread. Some recipes called for a mix of rice flour with the wheat flour.
The aim was to make it fluffier than the French baguette, allowing it to be
easily stuffed with Vietnamese delights.
Bánh mì has
long been a food staple of the working poor. Bánh mì stalls and carts are
everywhere in the streets of Vietnam, providing simple and delicious
sustenance, typically for breakfast or the midday meal, to the masses. It was
street food long before street food became an obsession with foodies—in those
days, some well-to-do Vietnamese shunned street vendors out of concern about
typhoid fever and other illnesses. Ingredients like the sweet, crunchy fresh
vegetables and pungent herbs and spices are what make the bánh mì Vietnamese. An essential
component of the Vietnamese way is Maggi sauce, a Swiss-made savory seasoning
introduced by the French.
Bánh mì could
be found in the communities of Vietnamese students and émigrés in France from the 1950s
onwards. The traiteur Hoa
Nam in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris has been selling bánh mì wrapped in wax paper for
years, although the foodie trend in bánh mì is now evident in bobo (bourgeois and bohemian) spots on the
Right Bank like Saigon Sandwich and Bulma. But it was the mass exodus of
Vietnamese with the Fall of Saigon in 1975 that propelled the Vietnamese
sandwich on its way to global stardom. In no time, refugees in the United
States were opening Vietnamese restaurants, bakeries, and delicatessens,
offering up all the dishes from the homeland—including bánh mì—for fellow refugees and
curious American diners alike.
Some trace bánh mì’s cultural migration to the
sandwich’s burst of popularity in California’s Silicon Valley. Vietnamese
refugees eager to build new lives in America had flocked to the area to work in
the booming high-tech industry’s assembly lines. In 1980, a man called Lê Văn
Bá and his sons parked a food truck outside a computer manufacturing plant,
targeting Vietnamese who couldn’t go far or spend much for lunch. Lê, a wealthy
sugar merchant who had lost everything in the Communist takeover of South
Vietnam, sold the cheapest fare around, including Vietnamese baguette
sandwiches. It didn’t take long before bánh mì caught on with non-Vietnamese
workers as well as local college students.
By 1983, Lê’s sons, Chieu and Henry, turned the success
of the sandwich into Lee Bros. Foodservices, Inc.—the family Americanized their
name to Lee—which today serves more than five hundred independently owned food
trucks throughout northern California. The business also evolved into Lee’s
Sandwiches, a fast food chain of dozens of shops selling bánh mì from San Francisco to
Houston. Cathy Chaplin, author of the Food Lover’s Guide to Los Angeles,
once blogged, “If there was a Lee’s Sandwiches for every McDonald’s, the world
would be a better place.” Indeed, when Lê died, his obituary in the San Jose Mercury News called him the Ray
Kroc of Vietnamese sandwiches.
Bánh mì’s
meteoric rise in the past few years is probably best explained by a convergence
of pop-culture food trends in the United States—the popularity of food trucks
dishing up tasty and inventive street food, the explosion in food blogging, the
phenomenal success of television cooking shows, and the advent of the celebrity
chef. The bánh mì
craze has produced an authority on the subject, Andrea Nguyen, a northern
California writer whose blog, Viet World Kitchen, explores the culinary
traditions of Vietnam as well as of Asia more broadly. She published The Bánh Mì Handbook: Recipes for Crazy-Delicious
Vietnamese Sandwiches, which made National Public Radio’s list of best
cookbooks of 2014.
“Vietnamese
bánh mì offers a wealth of textures,” Nguyen told me.
“Crispy bread! Fatty mayo and meats! Crunchy pickles! Hot chilies! Refreshing
cucumber and herbs!” Nguyen attributes bánh
mì’s
crossover appeal to its familiarity and adaptability. “It’s pretty, not overly
mysterious for people interested in exploring new cuisines,” she says. “It’s
varied in fresh vegetables, light flavors, and people can more or less identify
what they’re eating. Vietnamese cuisine blends East Asia with Southeast Asia, South
Asia and the West. Bánh mì is the perfect hybrid.”
One of her recent blog posts: “Laughing Cow Cheese Omelet Bánh Mì Recipe.”
Pauline
Nguyen, owner of the Red Lantern, Sidney’s top Vietnamese restaurant, sees the bánh
mì’s
attraction in its exquisite taste. “Let’s face it, the traditional French
baguette with jambon, a bit of fromage, and possibly some cornichon, doesn’t
quite compare,” she says. “You have a beautiful balance of the sweet and
piquant of pickled vegetable, the heat of chilies, and richness of the pâté and
mayonnaise, along with the unctuousness of the pork terrine, the aromas of the
coriander and spring onion, and of course the texture of crisp baguette.”
Just
as the cheap price drew Vietnamese to bánh
mì, says
Minh Tsai, CEO of the Hodo Soy tofu business in Oakland, it is one of the
reasons for its spreading interest among non-Vietnamese. He explains that bánh
mì was
quickly recognized as a bargain because Americans always perceived Vietnamese
food as tasty yet inexpensive. For the same reason, he adds, phở, the Vietnamese noodle
soup, likewise has become a ubiquitous dish across America.
In
the United States in the 1990s, bánh
mì was
still sold mostly within the Little Saigon enclaves in California and a few
southern states. Competition among the small Vietnamese establishments made us
wonder how they managed to survive. I remember the “Mua
Hai Tặng Một”—Buy Two Get One
Free—promotions in the fast food shops of San Jose, which became home to the
second-largest Vietnamese population outside Vietnam. Here bánh
mì became
a favorite of young Americans, including the local college students, looking
for a snack or throwing a small party.
“It
was all about volume and cheap labor,” says Steve Do, among the boat people who
fled Vietnam for the United States in the 1980s, who found financial success in
real estate and Internet technology stocks. “I lived with bánh
mì while
going to high school and college, and I knew several families who worked in the
business,” he told me. “Families working together making sandwiches eliminate
labor cost—even underage kids make sandwiches after school to help the family
out. Often the stores don’t hire anyone but Vietnamese newcomers who work under
the table while still on government subsidies. It’s the refugee way, but it
works.”
Grandma’s Cá
Kho Tộ
Nations
take pride in and gain identity from their cuisines. What would France be sans
pot-au-feu,
England without roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, or Italy deprived of
spaghetti? Yet, a mark of all things culinary is an ability to adapt and
transform. Various historians and writers put the origins of pasta in Greece,
Arabia, and if the legend of Marco Polo’s role in bringing it to Europe is to
be believed, China. The tomato prized in Italian sauces today appears to have
arrived from South America with returning conquistadors.
Appropriation
and adaptation are survival instincts for Vietnamese, a land coveted by others
and repeatedly colonized and dominated throughout the last thousand years. The
Vietnamese language is an amalgamation of French, Chinese, local dialects of
Khmer, Hmong, and Cham, and an array of other local tribal tongues. Atop a
traditional Vietnamese altar you’ll find various Buddhas, faded images of
grandpa and grandma, and statues of Taoist saints. This combination of Mahayana
Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism known as tam
giao is
the result of efforts to integrate religious ideas that arrived in the country
over the millennia. Ancestor worship is mixed with yearnings for Buddhist
nirvana while the temporal world is measured through the Taoist flow of life
force known as the qi.
Then
there is the story of Vietnam’s indigenous religion, Cao Dai, established in
the mid-1920s, which goes so far as to integrate and reconcile the world’s
major religions. In its cosmos it perceives Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism,
Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam all as human efforts to
worship and communicate with the one Supreme Being. It numbers Moses, Joan of
Arc, Louis Pasteur, Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-Sen, Jesus Christ, and the Vietnamese
poet Trạng Trình among its many prophets and saints. Graham Greene, in
his Vietnam novel The Quiet American, called Cao Dai the “prophecy of planchette,” as its
spiritualists receive messages of wisdom from the various saints in séances.
Little
wonder that we would see a mixture in Vietnamese cuisine as well. In bò kho, or
beef stew, to cite but one example, there’s beef, carrot, and tomato brought by
the French, curry powder from India, cinnamon from Ceylon, star anise from
China, and chilies, lemongrass, and fish sauce from Vietnam itself. If you feel
like it, pour in a little red wine from Bordeaux, it will still work
beautifully. Vietnamese cooking thrives on integrating new ingredients to
achieve new balances. What is invention, after all, if not one part theft and
two parts reinterpretation?
The
adaptive tradition lives on in the Vietnamese diaspora. Take this dish my
paternal grandmother used to make: cá
kho tộ: clay pot catfish, simmered in pork fat,
caramelized fish sauce, and lots of black pepper, something originating in the
Mekong Delta ages ago. Grandma once made this dish in Daly City, a
working-class suburb of San Francisco where we first came to live as refugees.
It caused such a stink to our neighbors’ noses they called the fire department
about a toxic smell. Mortified, we apologized and kept our windows closed
whenever Grandma prepared her favorite recipes. Today, however, patrons
wait up to three weeks for a table at San Francisco’s most celebrated
Vietnamese restaurant, The Slanted Door, owned by chef Charles Phan, where the
same dish that Grandma liked to make is served to appreciative diners, albeit
now paired with a light-bodied and smoky pinot noir.
What
once seemed quixotic, or even toxic, has thus become an American classic. Private
culture, perhaps especially in California, has a knack of spilling into the
public domain. A few decades ago, who would have imagined that sushi—raw
fish—would join the burger as an indelible part of American cuisine? Or that
curry powder and soy sauce would be found down Aisle 3 at every Safeway? Or
that an entirely new taste—umami, Japanese for
savory—would become part of American culinary idiom?
The
San Francisco Bay Area is a global table, where tastes and experiments go hand
in hand. I still have an article published a decade ago in the San
Francisco Chronicle
that declared, “America’s mean cuisine: More like it hot—from junk food to
ethnic dishes, spicy flavors are the rage.” It’s a reminder of the adulterous
nature of the Californian palate. Californians were among the first in the
United States to give up blandness and savor pungent lemongrass in their soup,
to develop a penchant for that tangy, burnt taste of spicy chili. “There are
15.1 million more Hispanics living in the United States than there were 10
years
ago, and 3.2 million more Asians and Pacific Islanders,” noted San Francisco’s
newspaper of record. “And the foods of those countries—longtime favorites with
Californians—are now the nation’s most popular.”
Sriracha,
the king of chili sauce, is threatening to usurp ketchup as the American
condiment of choice. It was invented by David Tran, another Vietnamese refugee
among the boat people, who became a multimillionaire on his blend of garlic
powder, distilled vinegar, and fresh red jalapeño. The green-capped bottle
graces the kitchens of the world cuisines from Chinese to Japanese, Mexican to
French, Moroccan to Indonesian. Tran and his Sriracha sauce are quite a
testament to the adaptability of people, cuisine, and culture in our global
age.
If
bánh mì survives as common street food in Vietnam today, I
imagine that some vendors are unaware of how Việt
Kiều—Vietnamese overseas—took
the sandwich on to international fame and glory. I remember the Vinh Chan
boulangerie in Dalat, the windblown and foggy hill station lined with French
villas and pine trees where I grew up. A Frenchman opened the bakery in the
1930s. Every afternoon around 4 p.m. there was always a line of customers,
enticed by the sweet aroma of freshly baked bread permeating the air. The warm
and crunchy baguettes came out of the oven to a
chorus of oohs and aahs. Vinh Chan was known for its divine French sandwich—a
baguette served with thin slices of cured ham, cucumber, a dab of butter, and a
little salt and pepper. In my child’s mind, this was a sandwich superior to the
bánh mì I tasted in Saigon. Such was the colonial
hangover that what was French was intrinsically better than what was reinvented
by us, the Vietnamese. Now I can take comfort in knowing that millions of food
lovers around the world enjoy their baguette sandwiches—fixed in the Vietnamese
way.
Andrew
Lam is editor
and co-founder of New America Media, an association of more than three thousand
ethnic media outlets in the United States. He is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese
Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and most recently, a collection of short
stories, Birds of Paradise Lost. On Twitter: @andrewqlam.