Bánh Mì California

By the company's own account, Ba Le opened its first California bakery in San Jose in 1982. Its founder, Le Vo, had left Saigon ten years earlier, and he had sold bánh mì there from a drink stand in the 1950s after learning to bake baguettes from the French. That sequence explains what a California bánh mì is: a baker's product that happens to be sold as lunch. The loaf comes off the rack warm, gets split, and receives pork-liver pâté and mayonnaise on both faces. Grilled pork or cold cuts follow, then pickled daikon and carrot, cucumber, cilantro, and rings of sliced jalapeño in place of the thin bird chile. The shop does its own baking, which is why the bread and the sandwich arrive in the same paper at the same moment.

Ordering is a matter of numbers. The menu board lists fillings by digit, so a customer orders by digit and size, and the sandwich is assembled while the next person is still reading. The cold-cut special, đặc biệt, is the usual benchmark; the grilled lemongrass pork and the chicken sit a little warmer on the board, and a vegetarian tofu line fills out the bottom. Cilantro and jalapeño are dropped by a word or a nod. The sandwich comes wrapped in white paper that fogs for a second with the heat of the loaf, and the crust cracks dry at the first bite, then comes the cool crunch of the pickle against pâté that has softened in the warmth. Plenty of these are eaten in parked cars outside strip-mall shops, the paper spread over a knee, since a baguette this light shatters and sheds crumbs on anything it touches.

The bread sets the clock on a California bánh mì. A rice-flour-cut baguette with a thin shell crackles when it leaves the oven and softens as the hours pass, so the half-dozen bought for an office are built with the pickle drained and the pâté laid on thickly enough to seal the crumb. The loaf runs longer and fuller than a typical Saigon roll, sized to a lunch rather than a snack, and a filling of mayonnaise, pâté, and grilled pork fat leans entirely on the vinegar of the đồ chua to stay bright. Bakery-delis in California put the sandwich counter beside a case of pastries and a cooler of iced coffee with condensed milk, and the two are usually bought together, the sweet coffee sitting cold against a warm, salty sandwich.

The fillings give the counter its range. Grilled pork is marinated with lemongrass and garlic and charred until the edges blacken, then sliced thin so it lies flat in the loaf; the smoke and sweet caramel of it carry across the counter before the sandwich is wrapped. The cold-cut special stacks chả lụa, the pale steamed pork roll, with sliced ham and head cheese, which eat cool and springy against the warm bread. Meatballs in tomato sauce run wet and are the filling most likely to leak through paper, and a fried-egg version fills the morning hours. Each of these lands on the same pâté, the same pickle, and the same bread, so a customer who switches fillings changes the temperature and the chew of the sandwich and leaves the frame alone.

California holds two centers of the sandwich, roughly 350 miles apart by road. San Jose, where Ba Le opened in 1982, grew Vietnamese commercial streets of its own. Orange County's Little Saigon, along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster and Garden Grove, packed bakeries, noodle shops, and markets into a few miles and became the larger and better-known district. A shop in either place works to the same pattern: a numbered menu, a loaf baked that day, and pickle made that morning, and a regular can order by number without looking up.

Origin and history

The sandwich reached California because of April 1975. After Saigon fell on April 30, the first large wave of Vietnamese refugees entered the United States through camps that included Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, and many settled in the cheap suburbs of Orange County and in the Santa Clara Valley. A commercial district followed the population. Bolsa Avenue in Westminster is said to have become the core of what would be called Little Saigon by about 1978, and the shops along it had to build a supply of bread, pâté, and pickles from nothing.

The earliest firm date on the sandwich itself is the company's 1982 for Ba Le in San Jose, which puts a Vietnamese bread bakery at work in California seven years after the fall of Saigon. Ba Le's founder came with a trade learned in Saigon, a storefront, and customers who already knew how the sandwich should taste. No record names the first person to sell a bánh mì in California, and the claim for any one shop rests on company accounts alone, so 1982 is best read as a documented early date.

In June 1988 Governor George Deukmejian unveiled freeway signs marking the Vietnamese business districts of Westminster and Garden Grove as Little Saigon. Ba Le had by then been baking in San Jose for six years. Drivers on the Orange County freeways have followed those signs to the Bolsa Avenue exits ever since, and the first stop for many of them is a counter with a menu board and a rack of baguettes still warm.