Flavor Boulevard

Yesterday was Flavor Boulevard’s 3rd birthday. Today is my nth birthday. Back in 2010, a good friend of mine used to give me a ride to San Jose at least once every other month, sometimes more, when I got cravings for Vietnamese food, and especially when the Lunar New Year approached. When Flavor Boulevard was about one year old, things got complicated. Long story short, I hadn’t been back to San Jose for two years. – Why? You couldn’t rent a car? – Well… you know the stereotype that Asian girls can’t drive? It’s true for this one. It’s embarrassing. People, even those who don’t like driving, feel much more relaxed when they drive me than when I drive them. I’m also used to driving in Houston, where signs are helpful and people are friendly. Driving in California scares me. I’ve been here for 4 years, driven here twice, and both times reaffirmed my scare. So Vietnamese food cravings are satiated with the places in Oakland, where I can reach by bus. I don’t remember what I did for the 2012 Tet (Vietnamese lunar new year), and there seems to be no record of it on Flavor Boulevard.

Then one day Mom decided: “Rent a car and go with Kristen to San Jose. It’ll be good for you to drive, and I wouldn’t worry as much as if you drive alone.” I asked Kristen, she agreed to join me (brave girl). I felt nervous and excited. I reserved a car. Step 1 complete.

I signed the paperwork and got the key. I turned on the engine. Yes! Step 2 complete.

I drove from Enterprise to Kristen‘s house. Minus the two times people honked at me and one strange male voice “where are you going baby?” that came from nowhere (there was no green light to turn left, I got confused and stopped at the intersection for god knows how long), I’d say it went smoothly. I parked across the street from her place. The phone call “I’m here” to her was the most accomplishing moment I felt last week. Step 3 complete.

There is a huge difference between driving alone and driving with another person. It’s more huge than the difference between I-880 from Oakland to San Jose and US-59 in Houston. We arrived at the Lion Supermarket. Step 4 complete.

We ate.

Cold-cuts bánh mì (silk sausage and pate).
Grilled pork bánh mì (also with pate).
A wider-than-my-hand ice cream bar with frozen banana, jackfruit, coconut shavings and peanuts that sent both of us back into the car to rest. (While resting, we sipped on sugar cane juice (with a salted kumquat) and tried to figure out the flavors of two frozen treats that tasted durian one minute, passion fruit the next, and jackfruit the next next. Those were weird.)
A giganmongous plate of bánh cuốn (steamed rice roll), where the rolls (quite a few of them too) were completely buried underneath a thousand other things: an eggroll, an infinite amount of chả lụa (silk sausage), fried shrimp sausage on sugar cane stick, bánh cống (fried mung bean bread), and a shrimp wafer. (We couldn’t finish this plate. A mere $10, not the best banh cuon I’ve ever had, but the leftover was enough for my dinner.)

We bought.

Bánh chưng for Tet.
Chewy sesame candy (mè xửng) and candied coconut strips, also for Tet.
Cha lua.
Pickled mustard greens.
Banana bread pudding.
Bánh xu xê.
Some fermented tofu cookies (I haven’t tried them yet, but Kristen said she likes them, so I think I’d like them too…)
Eleven green waffles at the Century Bakery, because when you buy 10 you get 1 free.
And other food things…

We drove back.

Minus one tiny tiny incident where stupid me forgot the key inside the car, locked us out, had to call Roadside Assistance and waited 30 minutes for the rescue, I’d say Step 5 was wildly successful.

I dropped Kristen off. Refilled the tank. Drove to Enterprise. Tried to park between a gargantuan 12-seat van (or maybe 17?) and a car. Got myself halfway into the spot and literally one inch away from the van before realizing that I could either stop or crash into the van. This was 7 pm, dark enough that the pedestrians who were pointing and laughing at my ridiculous situation couldn’t really see my face (I hope). Step 6 very far from complete. I called Kristen for rescue. She and her boyfriend rushed over. It was one of those moments when your friends seem to appear with a shining halo and white wings. I felt forever indebted to them.

When that car got into the spot (Kristen‘s boyfriend moved it like nothing at all), I sighed in relief, and strangely, my fear of driving in California also evaporated. The last barrier between me and food removed. I thought about the next trip to San Jose with ease. Now I can go there any time I want. Now I can have banh chung for Tet again. Now I can go everywhere.

Step 7 complete.

Step 8: learn how to park.

Happy Lunar New Year! Happy birthday to me. 🙂

Addresses:
Kim’s Sandwiches
1816 Tully Rd, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 270-8903
CD Bakery
1816 Tully Road, Store #198, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 238-1484
Thien Huong Banh Cuon Trang Hoi
1818 Tully Rd, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 238-8485
Century Bakery (inside Grand Century Mall)
1111 Story Rd, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 287-9188

P.S. Check out Kristen’s post about our adventure on her blog, she described the food in details. 😉

Isn’t she a fine beauty?

Stuffed to the brim. Peppery chunky crunchy meatloaf. Cucumber strips, cilantro twigs, carrot and daikon strings. And beneath it all, a layer of (possibly homemade) velvety vietnamesischer Braunschweiger, als ob es jeglichen Sinn ergibt. Ja, der Sandwich ist so explosiv gut it induces a spontaneous breakout of German.

Bánh mì pâté thịt nướng*. Not the usual chargrilled pork banh mi I’ve had elsewhere, this one has some kind of briny rich meatloaf. I ordered only two miserable loaves. Shoulda got 20!

On top of that I found the secret to a good spicy yet non-spicy banh mi.

I forgot to ask them to hold the pepper, so they put in loads of jalapenos, which I could only picked out when I got home an hour later. You can get rid of the pepper (and you should, unless you have a parrot tongue**), but you can’t get rid of the pepper sting (which you shouldn’t). That mere fire tail left behind in the bread and the veggies and the meat gives just the right kick without overwhelming the other tastes. But if you wait too long (a few hours in the fridge) to pick out the jalapenos, then you might as well not pick them out at all, the sting has already soaked deep.

Address: Bánh Mì Ba Lẹ (East Oakland)
1909 International Blvd
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 261-9800

(*) I didn’t see “bánh mì pate thịt nướng” or “thịt nướng pate” anywhere on the menu, I just copied the customers who ordered before me and the ones before them. Seems like a popular combination, for obvious reasons. So bánh mì is really like cơm tấm, only your imagination, not the printed menu, can limit your options! 😉

(**) I was told that the if you feed parrots chilipeppers, which they actually can eat, their pea-shaped tongue can get thinner (the heat peels it off) and allow them to talk. I haven’t found a source to verify this though…

Must have been at least seven years since I had a bánh mì ốp-la (bánh mì with sunny-side-up egg). Most Vietnamese sandwich stores in the States don’t put eggs in their breads, but ốp la (probably a strayed pronunciation of “omelette” in French colonial days) is the most common type of bánh mì stuffing you can find on the streets in Vietnam.

This store contains as much variety as twenty street food stalls: about 15 kinds of banh mi, with meats, pate, vegetarian, and even sardines (cá mòi), ranging from $2.50-$3 each. Then there are bò kho, bún bò, bánh cuốn, rice plates, bánh dầy, bánh tét, and a thousand other things. Thank god there is no phở here.

Ba Lẹ’s bánh cuốn comes with a garden, finger-thick cuts of chả lụa, and cubes of deep fried mung bean batter named bánh cóng. It’s not as good as the shrimp-and-sweet-potato tempura accompanying Tây Hồ‘s bánh cuốn, but it has a lot more rolls than Tây Hồ’s for a lower price. Tây Hồ still has the best rolls, but these are good too. Except they aren’t pre-halved in length. Oh well. Sloppiness is street-foodieness.

The location is less than appetizing to the eye. On rainy days, you see worn down bricked alleys with puddles. On dry day, you see worn down brick alleys with unkempt people. The buildings are old, the paints have faded. But the steady flow of customers even on rainy days confirms that Ba Lẹ isn’t just a name from the pre-1975 Saigon. It’s one of those real banh mi’s.

Address: Bánh Mì Ba Lẹ (East Oakland)
1909 International Blvd
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 261-9800

In one bite you taste a garden. Minty fresh coriander, crunchy pickled carrots, a load of soft white pickled onion, but most special of all is the aromatic burnt lemongrass. It makes the charcoaled pork here extra flavorful just as crushed peanuts make Huong Lan’s texturally delish. Microwaved, the pickled sweet onion and meat grease make the bread somewhat like a slice of steamed baguette dressed with chives and lard (bánh mì hấp mỡ hành). Thumbs up.

Kim’s Sandwiches (in the Lion Supermarket area)
1816 Tully Rd 182, San Jose, CA 95111
(408) 270-8903

The owner is supernice. More from this store later.

Another day, another banh mi.

And another. And another. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted thịt nguội (Vietnamese cold cut, also called “ham”), chả lụa, or pâté, and I didn’t want to settle for the special ($3.20) which has all three, because that means there is less of each. Like a good girl I got all three ($2.75 each), then mixed and matched. Cha lua is nothing beyond expectation, smooth and pure, sliced as thin as chicken skin. To its left is the firm rosy thit nguoi, made from cured pork and fat strips, similar to pork belly. To its right is pork liver pate banh mi. The brown spread looks like nutella with pepper,  feels grainy and silky on the tongue, and tastes magnificent. In one bite of oozing goodness, you can find something nutty, something sweet, a bit fatty and rich, a lot of salt, no sign of bitterness, all tempered by the mildly sour pickled carrots. Pork liver pate is my favorite.

Although most scoffers stay at Saigon Express for no more than 10 minutes, just enough time to grab a quick sandwich or a phở to-go, I dined in just to sample more food. Seemingly everyone comes here knowing what they want, I wonder if some of the dishes are forever hidden in the multipaged menu. I dug one out from the clay pot section: tofu and prawn claypot, served on white rice. For only $7.75, I can’t complain that its quality isn’t up to par with Le Regal’s ca kho to. There’s plenty of thin, almost broth-like sauce to soak your soft fried bean curd and wet your rice. The shrimps are plump. Mushy onion slivers encase tiny, juicy, salty outbursts.

Having stationed here for fifteen years, Saigon Express weathers the ebbs and flows of the competitive eatery market by setting its price low. The most expensive items are $7.75, easily portioned into two meals unless you’re preparing for football practice or something of sort. It also takes credit card.

Address: Saigon Express
2045 Shattuck Avenue (at the corner with Addison St, and in the same block as Biryani House)
Berkeley, CA 94704

Older posts on banh mi:
– banh mi ba chi pate (pate pork belly sandwich)
– banh mi thit nuong (grilled pork sandwich): from Lee’s Sandwiches and Huong Sandwiches

You know how school kids don’t get tired of peanut butter sandwich even if they eat it every day for lunch? Well, every time I catch the BART down to Fremont, it’s hard to pass up the chance to stop by Huong Lan Sandwich in Milpitas for a fresh crusty loaf, or many of those banh mi’s – a week’s supply for lunch.

When in California, be liberal. The store has diversity. Above is packages of bánh bèo (white) and most likely bánh bột lọc (leaf-wrapped). Many kinds of cookies, crackers, shrimp chips, and other snacks unknown to ubercmuc. Below is the real goodies: nice warm bánh bao (steamed pork bun), bánh cốm (the bright green flat thing), bánh giò (leaf-wrapped pyramid), and mini bánh chưng (the squares).

Here’s the square unwrapped and cut in four. The pork is fatty, which is not quite right, but nonetheless it’s well done. So the story goes as follows: in a competition among the princes in ancient Vietnam, the king asked all the princes to find an exceptionally good food. The youngest prince, having no money and little power, couldn’t afford fancy stuff like ginseng and who knows what in the woods, so with the advice of a god in his dream, he took sticky rice, meat, and mung bean to make a bánh, wrapped in lá dong (Phrynium placentarium), and boiled for hours. The bánh is a green square, symbolizing the square Earth, pork – the animal, and mung bean – the plants. So I suppose fatty or lean pork doesn’t really matter to the story. After all, we have some really chubby animal, not just skinny ones. Mung bean seems to be Vietnamese’s favorite legume, just like red bean is to the Japanese. Perhaps because it’s good as a paste (in both sweet and savory bánh), a powder (on xôi), whole beans (in sweet deserts like chè), and as an ice cream flavor.

Don’t let size tricks you. Half of this mini bánh chưng definitely made a filling breakfast, the whole thing would be too filling. And if you’re too full you wouldn’t be able to eat a nice crusty bánh mì for lunch… uhm hmm…

Look at all that pickled carrots and radish. It’s a balanced meal. I usually get bánh mì thịt nướng (grilled pork), but that is proven quality, so this time gà nướng (grilled chicken) is up for test. I should stress that no matter what the filling is, a banh mi can never go wrong. You can put just soy sauce and a banana in it, and it would still be yummy. Something about the crusty, flaky bread that makes everything better. Back to the chicken. Well, it’s not dark meat, and it’d take some serious brining to make white meat flavorful. So let’s put it gently, I’ll be loyal to grilled pork.

Hương Lan must be a chain, or it’s just a name sandwich-makers like. They’re everywhere in this area, but I believe every store has a different touch to it. Here they put peanuts and nước mắm in the grilled pork bánh mì. The more flavors the merrier. Address: 41 Serra Way #108, Milpitas.

Oh, the end of the story is, the youngest prince, proved to be the wisest, was chosen for the crown. 🙂

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 something I feel like I know but can’t remember from where or how I knew) tells me that the fatty pork is smoked Update: the pork is cured, but I don’t know if that explains the almost-too-attractive-to-be-natural red colour, which reddened the edge of the baguette as well. What is a banh mi with lipstick? Should you vote for it? Anyhow, I could taste little pate in there, and it would take a lot more pate to overpower the sour bickering of the shiny red slices. My loyalty with good ol’ grilled pork banh mi remains.

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 Vietnamese bread to keep it authentic. That’s quite ok, though. It could be because I skipped lunch today and starved after I got out of class, but this dinner was thoroughly enjoyable.

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)

Both have half a boiled egg, seasoned ground pork, one piece of boiled Chinese sausage (lap xuong), and some kind of vegetable relatives, which is green pea in Huong’s version and some diced carrot in Lee’s. Both are coated with a thick layer of wheat dough, then steamed, hence banh bao can be called steamed bun. The piece of boiled Chinese sausage, remnant from the Chinese ancestor baozi, is a letdown in both Huong’s and Lee’s (the moral of the story is never eat your Chinese sausage boiled just because it tastes good when it’s fried). So what’s the difference? Well, the coat is one difference. Huong’s has it fluffy and light, it looks thick but it tastes lighter than the inner fluff of a biscuit, and the inner most side is wet with sauce from the stuffing. The stuffing is the other difference. Huong’s is slightly sweet, slightly salty, slightly peppered, and it was just down right savory. I savored it, every bite. That clump of meat couldn’t be any better seasoned, the egg also sipped some of the savory sauce and became seasoned itself. For only $1.50, it surely makes your tummy happy for a while.

We got one banh bao with 4 banh mi thit nuong and a tray of banh bot loc, all for $15.50, and the lady took only $15 (we believe she didn’t want to break our 5-dollar bill, since we didn’t have 50c in change). She doesn’t know a whole lot of English, but we could tell she was happy that Mudpie could speak some Vietnamese. 🙂 I don’t know when I will be in the area again, so I’m counting on Mudpie to do more exploration with the wide variety of labelless food items in that little shop.

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 the cheese, cut it vertically, stuffed in some homemade grilled pork and pickled vegetable, added some soy sauce. Voilà. A banh mi – a banh (made of) wheat. Actually I don’t know what people originally ate banh mi with, I just know that it’s an all-day food. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, after school snack, late night snack. The stuffing can be hot meat, cold meat, eggs, banana, sardines, tofu, pate. We always choose grilled pork when we get our banh mi.

It’s not the best quality pork, but the flavor is top notch. The right mixture of salt, sugar, garlic, onion, a little bit of time to sit and soak, and some hot grill. We always had too much food to eat banh mi right after we bought them, so we had it for lunch the day after. The fridge did a fine job preserving the taste. The oven helped bringing back the bread’s crunchiness, which meshed well with flavorful pork, pickled carrots and daikon, a thin spread of liver pâté (not the infamously bitter foie gras), a couple shooks of soy sauce, one or two sprigs of cilantro. I take out the cilantros, Mudpie likes them.
For $2.75, would you rather a couple of double cheese burgers from McDonald’s, a 6-inch sub from Subway (I think the price was raised not long ago and no longer less than $3?), or a banh mi thit nuong? I’d go with banh mi thit nuong every time.

Address: Hương Sandwiches (near San Jose State University)
404 S 2nd Street Ste A
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 287-8688