Bánh Mì Xúc Xích Phô Mai
Sausage and cheese bánh mì; hot dog style with cheese.
Sausage and cheese bánh mì; hot dog style with cheese.
Bánh mì with xôi (sticky rice) stuffed inside; carb-on-carb, filling street food.
Bánh mì with xôi khúc (green sticky rice balls with mung bean); Hanoi specialty inside bread.
A Cantonese siu maai dumpling crossed into Vietnam and gave up its wrapper. The filling became a soft pork meatball in tomato gravy, eaten in Đà Lạt as a sandwich you can almost drink.
Pork meatballs in tomato sauce bánh mì; small, tender meatballs in slightly sweet tomato gravy.
Xíu mại meatballs with pâté; combination of textures.
The vegetarian xíu mại bánh mì belongs to Vietnam's chay tradition, eaten on Buddhist lunar days, its craft a mock meatball of gluten, tofu and taro that crumbles like loose pork without the fat.
Bánh mì from cart vendors; mobile street food stalls.
Little Saigon, Westminster style; heart of Vietnamese-American community.
Bánh mì with roast duck; Chinese-influenced, lacquered crispy skin.
Marinated duck grilled until the skin chars and the fat renders, sliced warm into the loaf. The fattest, gamiest poultry banh mi, where the pickle does all the cutting against the bird.
The Việt Kiều bánh mì is the homeland roll rebuilt abroad by the people who left: longer, fuller, jalapeño-loaded, sold from refugee lunch trucks and bakery-cafés to a community first.
Sidewalk bánh mì; classic street food context.
Đùi gà nướng is the grilled-thigh bánh mì: dark meat pushed past 180°F so its collagen softens through hard char, in a Hanoi-pepper or Saigon-lemongrass marinade, in a brittle rice-flour loaf.
Trứng alone is a half-finished sentence; the cart picks the egg form, and one frame is engineered for the worst-behaved of them so it works for the others by margin.
Bánh mì trứng ốp la turns on one instruction: leave the yolk liquid. Trứng is the egg, ốp la the soft-yolk fry, and the runny center is the only sauce in a thin rice-flour loaf.
Bánh mì trứng muối puts a cured duck-egg yolk in the loaf, weeks in brine deep, firm and orange-red, salty enough to season the whole sandwich the way an anchovy seasons a sauce.
Bánh mì trứng luộc is the one egg bánh mì cooked in advance, a hard-boiled egg sliced into dry coins with no runny yolk and no heat, so the spread and the pickle carry the whole frugal roll.
Bánh mì trứng kho wedges a braised egg into the loaf: whole eggs simmered in dark caramel and fish sauce until the white turns amber, usually a leftover from the Tết pot of thịt kho trứng.
The rolled-omelette bánh mì is named for the act of rolling: a thin egg sheet turned over and over into a log, then sliced across into spiral coins that lie flat down the loaf where a folded sheet.
Fried egg bánh mì; can be fried hard or soft.
The heaviest of the fried-egg bánh mì: minced pork beaten through the omelette, not laid in as a slice. The pickle has to run heavy to cut so much protein in one layer.
The fried-egg-with-scallion roll, hành lá beaten through the egg before it hits the oil: the cheapest hot bánh mì on the cart, a student and labourer breakfast tracing back to the casse-croûte.
Bánh mì trứng bác is Hanoi's soft-scramble egg roll, named for the verb for working eggs into loose, glossy curds. Stopped while still shining, packed spare into the north's short crisp-shelled loaf.