 Lee’s sandwiches has different kinds of banh mi on their menu, and although I’m a stingy about chances to try out varieties (after finding out my favorite, of course), my mom often surprises me by how open-minded she is on a few things. For example, despite my usual fondness of banh mi thit nuong, this time she got me an extra: banh mi ba chi pate, the new and only item on Lee’s menu that has pate in it. I’m not sure if I would even have seen that on the menu myself. “Ba chỉ” literally means “three threads,” which I loosely understand as three layers, because there’s one really thin layer of skin, then there’s fat and meat. That’s right, sometimes words reflect great imagination of whoever made up the word originally. Just to confuse you, this type of meat is also called “ba rọi” in the south, and I have no clue what a “rọi” is, maybe a mispronunciation of “loại” – “type”? I digress. The meat is so thinly sliced that skin and fat can almost go unnoticed in your mouth. My gut instinct (well… not quite, just […]
Continue reading Banh mi ba chi pate
 My roommate is out to Bible study. I have wasted enough time on the internet today, my homework is patiently waiting in the corner, and so is my refrigerated banh mi thit nuong bought at Lee’s sandwiches in Houston Saturday morning. Tightly wrapped and into the microwave it goes (the sandwich, not the homework). Steam coming out of the hot freshly 3.5 minute microwaved banh mi and marinated grilled pork clouds my vision as you can see above. Below is after the lens has recovered. Strangely this banh mi tastes better than all the others I’ve had from Lee’s, and I’ve had a lot of their banh mi thit nuong. Now this is the first time I have it microwaved, also the first time I keep the cilantro. For some reason the meat was more flavorful, a tibbit more charred (3 minutes and 30 seconds was a little long, I think). The bread was crunchy at parts and chewy at others. There is no pâté in Lee’s banh mi thit nuong, no soy sauce, no sauce at all actually. They didn’t even bother replacing the baguette with the Continue reading Microwave is the way to go for banh mi
 Vietnamese I’ve been back to Texas heat and rain for a week, but my blog will still be on California for who knows how long. With my snail fast speed *maybe* we’ll finish talking about California when I graduate. Anyway, 3 years after leaving Saigon guess where I had my first Vietnamese banh bao in America… Lee’s Sandwiches in Houston. My first impression? Decent. That’s all I could say about Lee’s banh bao. But that was then. Now I can say something else: Huong’s banh bao is better. (I blogged about Huong’s Sandwiches here and here) Continue reading More from little banh mi shop
 Vietnamese Except for the little houses with little gardens, and with cars replacing motorcycles, San Jose resembles Binh Thanh District in Saigon. I don’t know the demography of the city, or even of the state of California, but I saw Vietnamese everywhere when I was there. Palo Alto doesn’t breathe exclusively Vietnamese, but it has Asian everywhere. Gas stations, restaurants, office employees at Stanford, ladies walking by your dorm in the morning, the mall… But Palo Alto doesn’t have banh mi. San Jose does. And it has good banh mi. Mudpie found Thanh Huong’s Sandwich from Google (the sign on the building says Huong). Two out of three times we went to San Jose when I was in Palo Alto, we went to Thanh Huong’s. The other time we went to another banh mi place which didn’t have it as nicely as Thanh Huong’s does. Here’s my hypothesis of how banh mi came about: the French colonized Vietnam and brought with them some baguette for breakfast, the Vietnamese looked at the French baguette, thought “what’s the point for being so long?”, made it shorter and lighter, kept the pâté and to heaven […]
Continue reading Banh mi Huong
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