The Best Part of the Banh Mi

Something horrible happened yesterday. All Over Albany ran an Eat This! that suggested its readers go out to the newly reimagined Reel Seafood and order the impossible: a banh mi wrap.

“Don’t you mean ‘improbable’? Because I can see quite clearly from the picture, it exists.”

No. No, I don’t. As Deanna points out in her story, “banh mi” means bread. Trying to make a banh mi without bread is like making an omelette without eggs or risotto without rice. Calling it a banh mi wrap would simply imply that you’ve taken bread and encased it within a tortilla, and that’s not what is happening here.

For what it’s worth, you also can’t have a muffaletta taco. That sandwich is also named after the bread on which its served.

If any of this is sounding familiar, it’s because I wrote a full post on the evils of wraps just last month. It even detailed the ingredients of the dreaded “spinach” tortilla similar to the one shown in the AOA story. So I don’t want to rehash that or pick apart the dish in yesterday’s story ingredient by ingredient. That hardly seems productive. And Deanna has good taste, so I’m sure–wrap aside–the thing is truly delicious.

But I do want to take this chance to clear up a key point about the classic Vietnamese sandwich.

Deanna recognizes the great volume of disappointing banh mi in the Capital Region. And indeed she is correct in her assessment of the landscape and identifying one of the critical problems: nobody can get the right bread for the sandwich. Nobody is making it in Albany, and nobody has been able to bring it in from an actual Vietnamese bakery.

Which is primarily why she lauds Reel Seafood for taking a leap and breaking the mold with a wrap. Deanna writes, “In going this direction, it replicates the best part of the sandwich (the flavors) while avoiding its most common downfall (again, the bread).”

Clearly this is where she and I part ways. So let’s talk about the best part of the banh mi.

You could ask yourself, why are banh mi so popular in the first place? There was some fellow who wrote about this a few years ago. Here’s part of what he had to say:

Yes, it’s delicious. But a lot of things that are delicious do not have such a devoted following and avid fan base. It’s also a bit exotic, and at the same time familiar . . . I have a different argument. I say the banh mi enjoys its current state of popularity because the thing is just so impossibly inexpensive, especially in relationship to its deliciousness.

The best part about the banh mi is its value. But there is something else that I love about this sandwich, and that is its history.

World history is long and complicated. When most Americans think about Vietnam, and the country’s past, I reckon it conjures images of Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. As sad a state of affairs as it may be, if it weren’t for the banh mi, I might never have known about the period of French colonialism in the nation.

The Vietnamese took French bread and made it their own. And I am reminded of this every time I come face to face with one of these sandwiches. The addition of rice flour gives this interpretation of a baguette its remarkable shattering crust. And this contrast of textures (in addition to the contrasts of flavors and temperatures) is yet another thing which makes the sandwich great.

But the bread isn’t the only cross cultural component of this dish. It’s also the egg yolk enriched butter that sometimes is closer to mayonnaise, but occasionally called hollandaise. And the addition of pate as a funky layer of flavor is quite French indeed.

Calling something a banh mi while depriving it of its history, robbing it of its value, and eliminating its one defining characteristic is simply wrong. The specific details of how this one at Reel Seafood went wrong are immaterial. Fortunately, I’m not so desperate for the flavors of grilled meat and pickled veggies that I have to subject myself to this abomination.