For our anniversary, Boone and I took a jaunt to New Orleans in May for a two night get-away. My parents’ next-door neighbor and long-time friend has an apartment RIGHT IN the French Quarter, so we had a pretty lovely spot to drink, eat, and wander. This is, of course, exactly what we did. Our first stop was Dong Phuong Bakery, a place my dad had heard about from friends. This tiny spot had a sit-down noodle shop on one side, and a pick-up bakery and banh mi shop on the other. Oh, y’all. I’d never had a Banh mi sandwich before, so we ordered THREE different ones (before you judge, you take look at the menu and see how you’d choose just one.) There’s nothing nothing nothing good to say about colonialism. However, I guess Banh mi is one example of a food fusion that was created in French-controlled Vietnam, AND is also an example of a sandwich that was basically MADE for life in New Orleans, home of one of the strongest (if not the strongest) Franco-fusion culture in our country. It turns out that there’s a pretty large Vietnamese-American community in south Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and they are shaping and molding local flavors to their own tastes, and in return, influencing the local cuisine to reflect their presence (SO AWESOME). I fell in love with the sandwich, but unfortunately, my sweet little town doesn’t have our own Vietnamese Bakery. (Here’s hoping.) In the meantime, I started trying to figure out how to make my own at home.
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