Bánh Mì Phố Huế

Number 118 Phố Huế, in Hanoi's Hai Bà Trưng district, opens around 6 a.m. with a counter on the pavement and almost no room behind it for a customer to sit. Orders go in through the front, the roll comes back in a paper sleeve, and it is eaten standing on the street or carried off on a motorbike. The shop bakes a morning supply and sells until it is gone, usually by late morning, and the standing advice about the place is to arrive before 9. By ten the line has stretched along the shopfronts and the first, hottest rolls of the day have already been handed over.

The build is short. The roll is the small, thin-skinned Hanoi kind, and it is said to be crisped over charcoal. Inside goes pâté made by the shop, spread to the edges so each bite carries it, then a pinch of salt and a thin chili sauce, also made in-house and singled out by customers almost as often as the bread. A spoonful of ruốc, the dry pork floss, a slice of chả, cold cuts or xá xíu can be added on request, and some orders take a fried egg. A Saigon roll would carry a stack of pickles and herbs in the place the salt occupies here, and the short list is the Northern idiom of the capital, pâté first and few additions.

Fresh from the counter, the crust shatters at the first bite and sheds flakes down the front of a shirt, and a smoky edge comes through before the filling. The pâté is warm, soft and a little mineral, and the salt shows up as bright grains against it. The chili sauce is loose and vinegary, thin enough to run into the crumb, so the last third of the roll stings in a way the first third does not. Ten minutes in a plastic bag on the ride home undoes most of that: steam from the pâté softens the crust to leather, the spread sets firm, and the salt dissolves into it. Online complaints about limp bread usually describe that ride.

The street name sends many first-time visitors looking for something from the central city of Huế, and nothing on the menu connects the roll to it. Phố Huế is a long commercial street, and the shop takes its name from its address, as a great many Hanoi food stalls do. Locals give directions by the house number. Its nearest relatives in the city, Bánh Mì Dân Tổ among them, work the same Northern style, and a Hanoi diner comparing them talks about the pâté and the crust long before mentioning any add-on.

Opinion splits along clear lines. Praise goes to the hot, crackling crust and to a flavor many Hanoi diners describe as the taste of childhood. Complaints go to a curt counter manner and to fillings that vary from one visit to the next. A takeaway counter working through a dawn queue has little reason to chat, and people return for the roll and put up with the service. The ordering routine is simple enough to learn from one visit: the plain pâté roll, an add-on if wanted, a request for chili, and the first bite taken on the pavement while the crust is still too hot to hold comfortably.

Origin and history

The opening date varies by account. One puts the start of bánh mì service at 1974, another at 1978, and a third at more than forty years of history, which places the start no later than the early 1980s. The three figures agree on a counter that has worked Phố Huế for somewhere between forty and fifty years, and none of them names a founder or describes the first stall.

The present-day operation is recorded in far more detail, and consistently across years. The shop is a fixture of Hanoi bánh mì rankings, and customer reviews span enough years to show the price moving, from around 25,000 VND in older reviews to 30,000 to 40,000 VND in recent ones depending on the add-on. The same takeaway counter at number 118, the same house pâté and thin chili sauce, and the same supply that runs out before lunch recur throughout.

Of the three dates, the newest is a 2023 figure that counts 118 Phố Huế among the Hanoi bánh mì shops with more than four decades of trade behind them, which means the counter has been opening at dawn and selling pâté rolls through the morning since the early 1980s at the latest.