Bánh Mì Lee's

Lê Văn Bá and Nguyễn Thị Hạnh borrowed their son's catering truck on Saturday mornings in early 1983 and parked it near San Jose State University, selling bánh mì to a college crowd the truck's usual Chinese-and-American lunch route never reached. The line held up week after week, strong enough that by June the family rented a storefront six blocks over, at Sixth and Santa Clara streets, and put a name on the window: Lee's Sandwiches. Four decades later that single counter has grown into roughly sixty stores spread across eight states, from California to Oklahoma to Virginia, still owned by the same family and still building the bánh mì the parents sold off the truck bed: grilled pork and chả lụa and pork-liver pâté under pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, cilantro, and sliced jalapeño.

The truck is the part of the story that explains the rest of it. One truck fed one route. A second truck needed somewhere to park overnight, restock ice, and get hosed down before the next shift. So in 1982, a year before the storefront opened, Chiêu Lê and his brother Henry set up Lee Bros. Foodservices, a commissary built to service other families' catering trucks rather than just their own. Within three years it was supplying more than five hundred independently owned trucks around the South Bay, many of them run by other Vietnamese refugee families doing exactly what the Lês had done a year or two earlier. The sandwich chain grew out of the commissary business, not the other way around.

Keeping bread right at sixty locations is the harder trick, and it is why Lee's bakes inside the stores rather than trucking loaves in each morning from one central plant. Behind the counter glass at most locations a rack oven runs for most of the working day, and a fresh batch coming out sends a warm, faintly sweet yeast smell across the counter that a store working off a delivery van never gets. Pulled too soon, the crust stays pale and the crumb goes gummy under the pork. Left on the rack past its window, the same loaf turns tough at the crust and dry through the middle, closer to a stale dinner roll than the crackling shell a good bánh mì needs. The busiest locations, like the roughly 10,000-square-foot Houston store, run their ovens hard enough to turn out up to 300 baguettes an hour just to keep one counter stocked through a lunch rush.

Ordering runs off a lit menu board rather than a case of pre-made sandwiches, closer to how the small independent bánh mì counters work than to a typical American sandwich chain: a customer calls a filling number and a size, and the counter builds the order while the next person is already reading down the board. Since 2001 that same board has carried a second menu next to the bánh mì list, croissants, pastries, and Lee's Coffee, the company's own line of Vietnamese-style iced coffee drinks, sold from the identical counter as the pork and pâté rolls. The two menus run in parallel rather than compete, pastry and coffee traffic heavier in the morning, bánh mì traffic heavier at noon, off the same ovens and the same staff.

The franchise model that let the chain grow past what one family could run alone began in 2005, when Lee's became the first Vietnamese deli-café chain in the country to sell franchises rather than open every location itself. Growth since has leaned toward larger units rather than more scattered ones, closer to the Houston store's scale than to a corner counter, and it has gone abroad on the same terms: a store in Ho Chi Minh City in 2008, another in Taipei in 2015, both carrying the same bánh mì recipe back across the Pacific toward the country it started in.

At a suburban location today the crowd waiting for a number to be called is as likely to be office workers on a lunch break with no particular tie to Vietnam as it is Vietnamese families running weekend errands, and the same short exchange plays out at the register either way, a number and a size, done in under a minute. The bread crosses the counter warm enough to fog the wrapping paper for a second before it clears, the smell of grilled pork and pickled vegetables rising off it as it changes hands, and the iced coffee ordered alongside arrives in a plastic cup already sweating in the air conditioning. None of it reads as remarkable to a regular. It has been roughly the same transaction, at roughly the same speed, for most of the chain's four decades.

From a 1983 San Jose Storefront to a National Bakery Chain

Chiêu Lê, the family member most associated with building the company, was in his second year of law school in Saigon when the city fell in 1975. The new government shut the school and took over his family's sugar-processing business within months. He and his wife, Yến, were among ninety-eight people who left Vietnam together on a single fishing boat, one of the earliest waves of boat refugees to leave the country after the war, and the boat reached open water without the piracy or storms that sank or turned back other refugee boats that year. The couple spent thirteen months in a refugee camp in Malaysia, where their first son, Minh, was born, before the family was resettled in San Jose, California, in 1980.

In San Jose, Lê took night English classes at San Jose High and bought food between sessions from a Vietnamese-run catering truck; within a year of working for that truck's owner, he had saved enough to buy a route of his own in 1981, selling American, Chinese, and Vietnamese food to office workers and factory shifts around the South Bay. He and Henry added an extra 'e' to the family surname the following year when they registered Lee Bros. Foodservices, a small spelling change meant to make it easier for English speakers to pronounce, the same year their parents were still two years from putting any name at all on a storefront window.

The Euro-style pivot the chain still runs today traces to a specific proposal: in 2001 Lê's eldest son, Minh, by then a business student at San Jose State, put together the concept behind that second menu, a new kind of store built more like an American bakery-café than a bánh mì counter, and pushed his father to open one and test it. Minh did not live to see it open. He died in a traffic accident on March 29, 2001, about two months before he was due to graduate. His father opened the first store built to Minh's concept that August, on Bolsa Avenue in Westminster's Little Saigon. Every Lee's Sandwiches opened since has carried the same croissant-and-coffee line alongside the bánh mì counter, built from an idea its author did not live to see finished.