Ba Le Deli & Bakery

Ba Le Deli & Bakery @ 701 Kingsway

The other day we were looking for some food and happened to be in the Kingsway area, and I remembered Ben of Chow Times mentioning this place Ba Le had great banh mi that must be tried, so I thought we'd give them a try.

It's weird because I've driven past this shop all the time but I never noticed it was there. Something about the homogeneous look of the signage of the Vietnamese restaurants along this strip of Kingsway makes them all look the same to me.

This place is different from Tung Hing and Kim Chau in that you can actually sit down at a table and eat there. That's what we did. Usually it's just a counter.

The place was pretty hopping. There were people coming and going constantly. Kweepo bought a packet of the pate they use in their sandwiches. It was only about $4. It looked amazing and would be great for preparing a quick sandwich at home.

They have a cooler with drinks as well as some funky Vietnamese desserts like sweet rice with coconut cream. We each got a sweet rice dessert, and I got a crysanthemum tea drink:

It was artificial tasting like these kind of drinks usually are, but when in Rome...

Both of the sandwiches were very good. The pork slices in the sandwich pictured here were soft and really interesting and unlike the other banh mi I've had elsewhere, possibly the best. My only beef with this sandwich is that my bread was a little stale. And the bread isn't as big as the one at Tung Hing. I tasted a bit of Kweepo's sandwich, which I think was beef, and it wasn't nearly as good as mine.

Out of all the banh mi places I've tried it's hard to pick a favorite. I'd say I like the filling of Ba Le but the bread of Tung Hing and the sauce of Kim Chau.

Ba Le has the largest selection of sandwiches of all the banh mi places I've been to so far - about 10 versus the five or so at Kim Chau and Tung Hing. (Xu Hue only had two, though they weren't primarily a banh mi place)

Ba Le will definitely be worth visiting a few times to try out all their sandwiches. They also happen to be closer to me than the other places - they're right near Les Faux Bourgeois.

I live in the west end, so all of these banh mi places on Kingsway are still a long drive to go get a simple sandwich, but sometimes you're just in the mood for a good banh mi. It's nice to know there are several reliable places and lots more to explore if you want.

Cafe Xu Hue

Cafe Xu Hue @ 2226 Kingsway

In my continuing quest to explore random banh mi places to see how different restaurants prepare them differently, the other day we randomly picked a spot on Kingsway called Cafe Xu Hue. It was neighbored on the same block by literally two other vietnamese restaurants also serving banh mi. The other ones seemed a little bit noisy and Cafe Xu Hue a little more family-friendly and quiet, so Kweepo and I chose that one.

The place was tiny but every table was packed when we walked in and we had to rush to get a table before someone else took it (the empty table in the photo was vacated midway into the meal). We were the only non-Vietnamese there, if that's any sign of authenticity. It took a while for the very serious-looking waiter and waitress to come over to give us a menu. I don't think they smiled the whole time. When I was paying, she didn't even look at me or say anything. Not exactly the friendliest folks, but I think the small place was a bit overwhelmed with the weekend traffic.

They served us two glasses of tea and one small menu. Though you can't tell in the photo, the tea looked very light. And no surprise, it tasted just like water.

The menu had a few pho selections, spring rolls, etc - the usual. They had only two banh mi items on the menu - house special and chicken - so we chose one of each. I was tempted to order a pho out of habit, but stuck to my guns and ordered banh mi. They came out about ten minutes later. Eating at pho joints is already cheap enough, but eating banh mi makes for a ridiculously small bill. We paid $10 total for the both of us.


In the picture above I've got a half of one of each sandwich in my hand, so you can see what's inside. They didn't contain any pickled daikon, which was disappointing. The chicken banh mi was decent but a little bland, but the house special was pretty nice, with two different kinds of meat on top and some delicious roast pork at the very bottom. The roast pork really made that one special. Not putting any pickled daikon in was a little disappointing though.

Unfortunately they committed a cardinal sin when it comes to banh mi: the bread was stale. Fresh bread is a must for a banh mi. It fairly ruined the sandwich. So I can't recommend this place. At least now I have a point of reference to understand just why it's so important to have fresh bread, and why Tung Hing and Kim Chau are so great. It takes a bit of funding to be really set up to make banh mi the right way, be it with a bread oven or special arrangements with a bakery to have fresh buns delivered every day, and this is too small a shop for such fancy things.

The banh mi here had this mysterious long-leafed herb in it that you can see below on top of the cilantro:

I don't know what it is but it was incredibly aromatic and flavorful and made the sandwiches a lot better.

At the cashier's counter they had this little altar-like setup with handwritten signs that I thought was cute and homey.

My Bánh mì odyssey

Kim Chau Deli @ 707 Kingsway
Tung Hing Bakery @ 1198 Kingsway

Or mini-odyssey, if you will. In which I discover a new world.

For the past two days I've been eating Vietnamese subs at almost every meal. You know how excited you are when you discover some new type of food that's awesome and inexpensive and like the dawning of a whole new world you never knew existed? Well that's what I'm experiencing right now with Vietnamese subs. And it's funny because I've known about Vietnamese subs forever, but never tried them.

It all began with this post on Tung Hing Bakery over at Chowtimes. It got me really excited about the idea of trying some Vietnamese subs, which I'd ignorantly jilted over the years for its more beautiful cousin Pho. Rue the wrath of a scorned banh mi, for it is indeed a delectable little item that is greater than the sum of its parts. One taste and you will find yourself addicted to its sensuous pleasures, caught in a downward spiral of completely unwarranted thirty minute drives way out to Kingsway just to get a $3 sandwich for lunch.

It's funny because I go to this neighborhood all the time. I've been to The Roc (decent dim sum) directly across the street from Kim Chau three times, and I've been to House of Dosas on the same side of the street a minute away from Kim Chau probably close to a dozen times over the years. They've got the best dosas.

This stretch of Kingsway running from Broadway to Metrotown is packed with dozens of tiny little Vietnamese places with unpronouncable Vietnamese names, and if you're lucky an English translation. From the outside they don't look appealing, but often the crummiest looking appearance can conceal very authentic cooking. I've always wanted to try out more of the Vietnamese restaurants here, suspecting hidden treasures to be buried therein. I tried one such Pho place, one on Kingsway closer towards Broadway whose name I can't recall, but despite the authenticity of the low-key homeyness of the decor (=shabbiness), the pho itself wasn't that great. That kind of dissuaded me. But after trying Kim Chau and Tung Hing, the fire is rekindled and I want to explore this patch of unexplored territory.

Anyway, this is the banh mi counter in Tung Hing Bakery:


It's very orderly. You can see all the ingredients that will go into your sandwich right there. On one side of the store there is a bakery, with confections presented behind glass. On the other is the counter for ordering subs. A small menu indicates five or six choices of subs. The subs are all about $3. Behind the counter, prominently in view, are the machines they use to bake their own bread - they have to be at hand because they're in such high demand. The lady behind the counter spilled out a tray of hot new buns onto the counter while I was waiting.

In Kim Chau, on the other hand, when you walk in, it feels like you've wandered into some confections factory. All of the equipment is right there in view. I wasn't sure where to go to place my order at first. Again, there's a little counter where you can order your subs, with a little menu of five or six items, though the items aren't on display like in Tung Hing. The girl who took my order was very nice and informative about banh mi when I explained I was a banh mi virgin, telling me about how they're made with lots more ingredients in Vietnam like eggs, but they can't do that here because they're not street food like in Vietnam, and people apparently wouldn't be willing to wait around to have an egg cooked for their sandwich. So the banh mi has taken a different form overseas. I'd love to try an authentic banh mi in Vietnam sometime. She also explained how in Vietnam they usually use a cut of meat they call "bacon" but that actually consists of a thin strip of meat with a huge slab of fat attached.

Preparation takes 30 seconds tops:


The final product:


I tasted Kim Chau's banh mi yesterday, and Tung Hing's today. I won't say one is better than the other, because they're both awesome and clearly good at what they do.

The basic ingredients are cucumber, pickled carrots and daikon, cilantro, a smattering of special sauces, jalapenos, and a smattering of different meat ingredients. The sub I got at Kim Chau was the house special - it included three different kinds of special meat. I got two subs at Tung Hing today - one with pate that I had for lunch whose pate tasted very much like a relic of French colonial times (i.e. awesomely good), and one with a thick slice of so-called "garlic sausage", which I haven't tasted yet but looks amazing.

At Kim Chau the girl preparing my sandwich sprayed on at least three different sauces of mysterious provenance that went a long way towards making the sub so rich in flavor. She emphasized that when it comes to banh mi, it's all about the sauce.

And the bread. The bread is so good - soft and fresh.

Kim Chau has their bread shipped in on special order from a bakery, while Tung Hing bakes their own. The bread at both places was excellent. I personally grew up in France, so I know what a baguette is supposed to taste like, and it's pretty much impossible to find a baguette in Vancouver that tastes the right way. The baguettes they use at Kim Chau and Tung Hing are among the closer to the authentic French baguette that I've tasted in Vancouver. Usually a baguette you buy in a supermarket is either rubbery or the skin is way too hard. You practically break your teeth trying to bite into them. The baguettes they use for the banh mi at Kim Chau and Tung Hing are very soft, and way better than they look at first glance.

Everything is wonderfully fresh. And it needs to be, because they have a heavy throughput. I was speaking with the nice girl at the counter at Kim Chau about the art of banh mi, and she was telling me how they often get people coming in and placing huge orders of dozens of banh mi at a time, so it was a pleasure getting someone like me ordering only one! She had literally gotten an order of 60 banh mi that day. Wow. Apparently Vietnamese families buy them in bulk for home consumption.

There are many other banh mi places along Kingsway and elsewhere in Vancouver, so in the future I won't hesitate to grab a banh mi for lunch if I run across a banh mi joint.