Bánh-Mì Càphê, North Street: 'A sucker punch of pork, and moreish in the extreme'
The Vietnamese are here to improve your lunch
We don’t often review grab-and-go style lunch spots like this, but a good banh-mi is such a joy that I couldn’t resist commissioning this. I’d like to offer a warm welcome to Ben, our newest writer, who responded to my call out for pitches last month with this idea. It’s a great debut and has made me unreasonably hungry. Support Ben and other first time food writers by becoming a paying Saucer so that we can offer more opportunities to writers in Bristol.
I’ve lived on or near North Street for eight years, and despite the area’s panoply of offerings for a Nice Meal Out (COR, Sonny Stores, Soukitchen, Other, etc), for too long it has been a Quick Lunch desert (a reliable Clark’s Pie has been one’s best bet since — well, probably since Clark’s opened some 80 years ago). Now: a new kid on the block, and a glimmer of hope. Bánh-Mì Càphê, an offshoot of Stokes Croft/Cotham Hill’s Viet Kitchen, opened in July to immediate queues out the door of people who presumably feel the same way as me.
This café slims the Viet Kitchen menu down to a clear, simple offer: four variations of bánh mì, the Vietnamese sandwich born from French colonial influence (and one of the world’s great convenience foods), and càphê, which is the Vietnamese word for coffee.
Present and correct in all of the sandwich options are the customary bánh mì trimmings: pâté, strips of pickled carrot and daikon, thick cucumber batons, coriander, chillies and spring onion. Watching the assembly line at work, I notice two things which straight away set this operation apart from most in the UK. Where most of the time a light smear of pâté is undetectable in the finished sandwich, here I watch them apply the gamey paste with appropriate generosity. They also include the traditional bơ, or ‘Vietnamese butter’, which, despite the name, is actually a stiff, yolk-yellow mayonnaise made without vinegar or lemon juice, and sometimes with oil perfumed from the frying of shallots and garlic: rich, unctuous and quite distinct from commercial mayo.
The clear menu highlight is the ‘fat pig’ special (£10.50), which is populated by wobbling, gelatinous chunks of pork belly and glassy crackling, alongside pork floss and Vietnamese cold cuts chả lụa (smooth steamed sausage) and thịt nguội (red-tinted lightly-cured ham), lubricated with a couple spoonfuls of roasting juices. It’s a sucker punch of pork, and moreish in the extreme.
The grilled lemongrass chicken (£9) is also very good, headily fragrant and punctuated with strips of paper-thin, chewy, blistered skin. Tofu patties (£9) are a nice idea for the vegan option, providing both crunch and velvety softness, but it’s here that we run into an issue — it’s the juicy animal fats that keep the meat sandwiches moist and bind their elements together, and there isn’t an equivalent element here. It tastes just a little… healthy. And while they’ve gone to the trouble of making a mushroom pâte, it is too similar in texture to the patties’ interiors, such that the two become indistinguishable.
Having been open for barely three weeks at time of writing, Bánh Mì Càphê is naturally still experimenting and dialling in its processes, and on my two visits I encountered both inconsistencies and improvements. On the first visit, the baguette looked great, but was on the drier side; rather than cracking open a portal into a yielding, soft interior, the crust shattered dustily. The second time around, a softer, more pliant baguette meant less friction to the overall eating experience, but not enough textural contrast.
Still, both examples had good structure, shape and colour, and were already superior to that of their closest bánh mì rivals in Bristol, The Hanoi Social, whose bread suffers from a much more toothsome, classically French crustiness. Bánh Mì Càphê has the advantage of an in-house bakery, meaning they can tweak and adjust as they go, and I believe their bread can get to a truly great place.
Heartening as well was a particular adjustment made between my two visits: my first sandwiches were filled meat-first, with garnishes lining the open mouth of the baguette; on the second visit, they had swapped places. To the casual observer, this may seem a trivial detail, but it has serious implications. Tendrils of pickled vegetables curling around each other, with leafy coriander poking out between violent interruptions of red chilli: this makes for an attractive sandwich, sure, but an impractical one prone to spillage, and as we know, spilled garnish = unbalanced sandwich. Reversing the assembly order not only makes for a much more architecturally sound construction, it also means that the tongue’s first point of contact is with the satisfying, umami-laden primary filling, before the jolting relief of acidity and herbaceousness restores balance.
To me, the cardinal principles of the craft of sandwich-making are good ergonomics (they are a food of convenience which should be able to be eaten on the go without making a mess), and considerate assembly (how do the selections and sequencing of bread, fillings and condiments create a coherent whole?). This little adjustment is a poor choice, perhaps, if you are prioritising the cosmetic demands of Instagram’s algorithm, but a really great one for eating. Sandwich Sandwich could learn a thing or two.
But look, after all this in-depth sandwich analysis, I’ve completely buried the lede. Bánh mì is only half of the name of this establishment, and where they really, truly excel is their coffee. Sacks of imported Trung Nguyen coffee beans sit proudly on display, and their menu has an impressive selection of lesser-seen variations on Vietnamese coffee, which is brewed heart-racingly strong such that it can stand up to lip-tingling quantities of sweetened condensed milk.
The South-East Asian palate is known for its love of intensely sugary milk drinks, but in the decade since moving away from my native Thailand, my tastes have mellowed slightly, and I now seek a more tempered sweetness. If this sounds like you too, then your drink of choice should be the salt coffee (£6.50), which is topped with a cloud of creamy, heavily salted foam. Try the layers separately for a bracing clash of opposing tastes, then mix together to create a harmonious dessert-drink of exquisitely complementary yin and yang. I approach it initially with caution — caffeine has not historically agreed with my digestive system — but it is addictively good, and I can’t resist downing the lot.
Also delightful is the coconut coffee (£6.50), where the base coffee is topped up with a blended coconut milk ice-slush — endlessly crushable in a heatwave. These are expensive drinks, yes, but this is perhaps a blessing in disguise: I couldn’t otherwise be trusted not to risk my gastrointestinal health on the daily.
As business names go, Bánh-Mì Càphê’s is about as does-what-it-says-on-the-tin as it gets. A menu as small and streamlined as this is nothing if not a clear mission statement, and a promise that they are committed to the details; which, despite some areas for improvement, they demonstrably are. It already feels like an essential part of North Street, filling a much-yearned-for gap. Rejoice, and may your lunches never be dull again.
Bánh-Mì Càphê, 181 North Street, BS3 1JQ
All words and photos by Ben Kulvichit
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