The banh-mi craze has been going on for a while in New York, and with any luck they’ll soon become as ubiquitous across America as bubble tea. Everyone who’s tried one will probably tell you that they’ll eat a Vietnamese sandwich anytime and anywhere, but I sense whispered rivalries building up in this city as more and more banh-mi shops spring up. My first was purchased at Nicky’s in the East Village, and I’ll always be partial to their “Classic” sandwich, a buttery baguette densely stuffed with three kinds of pork, which warmed and filled me up on an otherwise-bleak winter day in 2008. The decadent combination of pate, ground pork, and roasted ham, contrasted with fresh carrots, cilantro, and jalapenos, is what makes the banh-mi a work of genius, in my opinion.
I’ve ordered the same thing at a tiny place on Broome Street, which offers a slightly cheaper and much, much bigger version. I was happy with what I got – like I said, you just don’t say no to a Vietnamese sandwich – but the bread was drier than the Nicky’s baguette, almost dangerously crusty. Not a bad option if you want to spend $3 on lunch and dinner combined, but I’d probably just spend an extra dollar and go to Nicky’s.
It’s very hard, in fact, to convince me to go anywhere but Nicky’s. But Paris Sandwich, a small establishment on Hester Street, has such a fanatical following (on the internet, at least) that I was willing to give it a try, and $4 of my hard-earned money. All reviews gushed about the bread, which is baked on the premises every hour, and I was guardedly hopeful that I would discover a source of fresh baguette that didn’t require a passport and plane ticket.
I planned to take the Chinatown bus to Boston last Friday, and a sandwich seemed like a good thing to bring on a four-hour bus ride that only stops at an Arby’s in New Haven. So before making my way to the Lucky Star pick-up point, I stopped by Paris Sandwich, a small but difficult-to-miss storefront with some very prominent signage. I decided on a shredded chicken bahn-mi, since I was branching out anyway, and it was handed to me promptly by a brisk bahn-mi server.
I made the bus with plenty of time thanks to this efficiency, and tried out the sandwich. Maybe it was the choice of chicken, a fairly unassuming flavor in comparison to a trio of pork, but the baguette was certainly the most memorable component. It was nice and soft on the inside, with a crackly crust that provided the perfect shell the other ingredients. Paris Sandwich has not, I have to say, fulfilled my quest for a real French baguette: the crust did not have the required shellacked sheen, and it was drier and dusted with some kind of cornmeal. But it was delicate and fresh, far from the offensive “Italian loaf” sold at so many delis around here.
The sandwich had the typical organization of a banh-mi: the meat stuffed into the uncut side of the baguette, strips of carrot and daikon and sprigs of cilantro running the length of the thing on the other side, topped unevenly with jalapenos to keep you guessing about how spicy the next bite will be. Eating one of these is always undignified, since unless you have perfectly placed incisors, you will inevitably fail to get a clean bite, and end up with an entire cilantro stalk or string of carrot hanging from your mouth. I was grateful that the bus wasn’t crowded, so there was no one next to me to witness this struggle or be showered by the layer of crumbs that I brushed off my jacket when I had finished.
Paris Sandwich is certainly worth going back to, although it came nowhere near to topping Nicky’s, and I certainly learned from the one I got that there’s no reason to stray away from the pork version. Honestly, I’m more excited about the prospect of buying a bag of mini-baguettes, which they sell for 85 cents, and taking them home to slather with butter and various other condiments.
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