One of the treats I was looking forward to seeking out in Vietnam was banh mi, Vietnamese sandwiches that are available in several tasty places in New York. Banh mi are something of a WSJ Fun Club tradition and also are one of my favorite foods of all time. So I was naturally psyched to be going to what I assumed would be the Banh Mi Mother Ship.
But my book didn’t include banh mi in its list of classic Vietnamese dishes. And there didn’t seem to be any banh mi for sale in Hanoi. I looked on restaurant menus — nothing. That was to be somewhat expected, as banh mi are supposedly sold street-side from carts, much like Pho. But I looked quite vigilantly, and nothing.
On our way out of Hanoi, I asked our guide Minh whether he had ever heard of banh mi. I described them and did my best with the pronunciation (”baaaan - meeee”?) but he had no clue what I was talking about.
This didn’t bode well. Were banh mi, in fact, an American creation that I would simply have to wait for until my return to the States? Would I in fact be unable to enjoy a Vietnamese sandwich in Vietnam?
Finally, on our sixth day in Vietnam, I found and had a banh mi cart in the local market. Here in the beautiful and charming riverside fishing village of Hoi An, where we’ll be for a few days, banh mi carts are plentiful. Only it’s spelled “banh my” and there don’t seem to be the same variations on the sandwich as I’ve seen in the U.S. My banh my cost 10,000 dong, which is roughly equivalent to 62 cents. That’s what I’m talking about.
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