A baguette, still warm from the oven, its golden crust trellised with cracks. Sandwiched inside, a bright green thatch of cilantro and jalapenos, a tangle of pickled carrots and daikon, a smear of pate. Loaded between that, maybe a layer of rich barbecued pork or zesty meatballs, even spicy sardines. This is banh mi, an addictive Vietnamese street food and the culinary pay dirt of French colonialism.
Across Westminster's Little Saigon, old men gossip and read the morning copy of Viet Bao at metal cafe tables, sipping glasses of strong coffee laced with sweetened, condensed milk and crunching into the day's first banh mi.
There are shops selling the community's unique fast food everywhere, tucked between coin-op laundromats and fruit stands loaded with jackfruit and durian, hidden like gifts in a concrete horizontal landscape of strip malls.
Local cooking instructors Diane Cu and her partner of a dozen years, Todd Porter, who live in nearby Costa Mesa, spend nearly as much time in these little shops as the old men. (They have an entire section devoted to banh mi on their website, www.whiteonricecouple.com.)
The Vietnamese coffee shops and French bakeries form a patchwork quilt of both cultures, offering boba and croissants, spring rolls and beignets, plantains and pennywort tea. It's easy to see why they're so inviting, why loyal patrons scout out their preferred cafes -- and stay away from others.
"I think my dad knows where we go," says Cu, explaining that her father avoids her favorite shops so that Cu won't tell her mother where he is and cut into his coffee shop time.
Cu, whose family moved from Da Nang, Vietnam, to Southern California when she was a child, and Porter, a native of Oregon, explain that a great banh mi starts with a great baguette. The best are lighter than many European-style baguettes, baked with a percentage of rice flour along with the wheat flour.
Fresher than fresh
In Westminster, the biggest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam, most banh mi shops are also bakeries. Often tiny storefronts deepen into long rows of ovens, where freshly baked baguettes commonly are pulled out every few minutes.
"An hour and a half is considered old," Cu says. "Anything that's not hot is half-price." Even so, often baguettes are priced 2 for 1 -- as are the banh mi in many shops.
