Bánh mì: It’s What’s in the Heart

Customers approaching Nguyen’s restaurant are greeted by the large sign displayed on the corner of the block on Dorchester Avenue.

Not an inch of Bánh Mì Ba Le is empty on a Saturday afternoon. A long stretch of customers wedge themselves in line, standing between the counter and a table in the center piled with Vietnamese assortments. Patrons rub elbows with one another and tins of Café du Monde. Voices in English and Vietnamese merge with the fragrant air of seared pork, rising amidst the anticipation inside the room. 

A woman in a hair net and fleece jacket draws near from the other side of the counter to ask: “Next! What would you like?”

They are all here for one thing: A baguette, golden and flaky to touch, sliced in the center to make an airy pocket of bread that will be filled with slices of thit nguoi (pork cold cuts); married with a rich liver paté; stuffed with stalks of cilantro; pickled vegetables; then finally wrapped in wax paper. 

An assortment that melds together to create the Vietnamese delight known and loved as bánh mì. 

A cheap and tasty fusion of French and Vietnamese cuisine, bánh mì is a story of fortitude. It’s widely celebrated in Vietnam as a compact sample of tradition and savor. In America, it persists with dedication in the hands of an establishment like Bánh Mì Ba Le. 

The driving force of the Dorchester Avenue shop is Jennifer Nguyen. Roughly five feet tall, in a coral pantsuit, the 63-year-old moves with the poise and composure of a Jacqueline Onassis. Some days, she’s seen wearing a dress that falls at her knees—always smiling—and holding a basket of food on her hip as she restocks the table.

It’s hard to imagine, decades ago, Nguyen’s success seemed beyond reach. 

Nguyen is proud to ensure the reputation of her bánh mì in Dorchester’s diverse community.

In a recent interview, she sits with one hand over the other, her elbow resting on the counter as she recalls her memories of bánh mì. A jade bangle hangs from her wrist. Her words are interpreted by a translator as she speaks mostly in Vietnamese. “I remember every morning before I went to school, I would stop to get bánh mì," says Nguyen. One of the most easily acquired foods in Vietnam. “Bánh mì is very close to all Vietnamese people” she explains. It had done more for her than she anticipated.

In 1981, Nguyen and her sister immigrated to the United States in their early twenties. They left the middle of Vietnam from Nam Tran to escape Vietnam’s civil war. After a long voyage from Hong Kong, they landed in Virginia. There, inside a bánh mì shop, the owner “brought me and my sister back to the kitchen and we saw how they [made] it.” They became friends, and feeling inspired, Nguyen and her sister embarked on the food industry.

Together they relocated to Massachusetts. “Two years later, my sister and I rented about a four-foot space with a table where we made bánh mì in [Boston’s] Chinatown,” says Nguyen. The tight space made it hard to maintain the morale necessary to continue their aspirations. “So that’s why we came here,” she says, gesturing behind herself to Dorchester restaurant which was once a fifth of the square footage it is today. “This place was very small.” Customers continue to file after one another to order as she speaks.

“From the beginning, it was very tough. We sold about thirty bánh mì a day; it was very tough and a lot of hard work.” It was so demanding that in 1999, her sister would leave the business. The shop was now left to herself. Nguyen, living in America for nearly two decades, was alone in other ways, too. She was a single mother of four struggling to make ends meet. 

“I’d stay up and prepare until 3 in the morning, take a quick nap, and then go back to work,” she says. “Sometimes it was too salty, too soft, too hot, and you always have to listen to customers to know what to change, which isn’t easy.” But this persistence increased Ba Le’s influx of customers. Her sales escalated from ten sandwiches to thirty, then to hundreds. “And finally,” she says, “I thought I did something right.” 

The sheer volume of support Nguyen has cultivated makes clear she’s overcome the hurdles of customer satisfaction. But Simon Stanley says that “if you change it too much, it becomes a sandwich.”

A blogger who has lived in Saigon for years, and the author behind “The Sandwich that Ate the World” published in 2016 by Roads & Kingdoms, Stanley was prompted to find the best five bánh mì in Saigon. Later, he was assigned to find out its history. 

Stanley discovered that bánh mì is a food reimagined from French ingredients. France occupied Vietnam in 1859, along with other Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and Laos, bringing with them meat (cold cuts), cheese, and most importantly, bread. Arguably the most iconic part of Vietnamese bánh mì.

The French lavished in these foods. This left the Vietnamese to eat fish and rice due to a xenophobic slogan that “bread and meat keep us strong, fish and rice keep them weak.” The French, for this reason, avoided traditional Vietnamese cuisine and did not allow the Vietnamese to eat their food.

When WWI began and the French troops were called to action shortly after Indochina was 

seized, there was a surplus of European perishables. This left much of the food forbidden to the 

Vietnamese now available in their markets. This also included other staples like sweetened 

condensed milk now enjoyed in Vietnamese coffee.

With bread now a chief part of Vietnamese diet, something they had not eaten before, it became 

primarily enjoyed through bánh mì. Today, it remains one of the only ways Vietnamese people typically eat bread. 

Bánh mì has remained a classic Vietnamese street food most abundant in its major cities ever since. It’s enjoyed as a quick breakfast acquired by workers and students. It’s so pedestrian that Stanley says people couldn’t understand why he was asking about bánh mì. “This is just the food we eat, what more is there to know about it?” 

A BBQ pork bánh mì is assembled swiftly with fresh ingredients that reflect Nguyen’s dedication to her craft.

But even if it’s just a sandwich to some, there’s a clear way to make it right. Stanley recalled one store in Vietnam that tried to modernize the sandwich by serving it in a sterile café with modern music. “They were putting way too much meat in it and charging more money. A few people said, ‘it’s too much meat, the balance is off.’”

The locals rejected it. “People there wanted Vietnamese food in a Vietnamese way,” Stanley says.

Bánh mì stands firmly in its convictions. “It simply refuses to be taken out of context,” Stanley notes. Even down to the bread, “it’s just out of necessity. They haven’t perfected it or tried to make it special. It’s just how to make the most volume out of as little flour as possible.” It doesn’t try to be anything except itself: modest and reliable.

This is something that even Vietnamese native Cam Tu Tran has come to realize during her time as a flight attendant for Kuwait Airways. For someone like Tran who travels the world, she’s proof of how strong the bond is between Vietnamese people and Vietnamese food.

Having lived in Saigon for 27 years, Tran says “it’s easy to find bánh mì everywhere,” but “I took it for granted. I missed it so much when I moved to a different country.” 

The accessibility was one factor, but most importantly: the texture. The classic Saigonese crust, portly and golden with “the soft airy texture inside.” It has proven to be the most difficult to find outside of Vietnam. Her smile grows as she recounts other quintessential Vietnamese additives that are missing elsewhere.

Egg yolk, oil, and salt: all married together as butter known as bơ trứng. Pickles, not as Americans know them, but as carrots and radishes thinly sliced to decorate the filling inside, and add to the palette of crunch and brine. And, of course, chili sauce: tương ớt.

These ingredients exemplify, Tran says, the diversity of Vietnamese culture. Bánh mì captures the essence of a Vietnamese lifestyle in a natural and efficient way. “In Vietnam, people just want to have a stable job and a stable life. If you look at the bánh mì stores in Saigon and you ask them how long they’ve been selling bánh mì, they’ll tell you decades,” Tran says.

With a population becoming increasingly young, bánh mì has endured a changing culture. Found in Saigon’s old-school backstreets as well as on its shiny office blocks, it’s a fragment of Vietnamese history enjoyed by the young and old alike. 

Jennifer Nguyen carries that notion further. She says, “I want to promote my business more to young people, and through my business I want them to value Vietnamese culture.” 

As a grandmother of eight, Nguyen attends to Ba Le at every chance she has. She considers it her fifth child. “I know there are people more successful than me,” she says about her shop. “But a lot of people walk in here with a happy face and talk about my sandwich.”

In a black snapback and a goatee, Tony exits the shop holding a large paper bag labeled “Ba Le.” Some family members trail behind him as he carries a bundle in the crook of his arm. He comes from New York. “I’m in Boston for a family emergency, but I definitely wanted to stop over 

here,” he says. “I heard about this place from Philly, so I had to stop by.” 

Another customer, Sky, says she always comes to Ba Le for bánh mì. Though she lives in Somerville, “I take the trek out here. This is one of the best, in my opinion, bánh mì places in the Boston area.” She waited twenty minutes just to get a sandwich of her own.

Steven, with a mouthful of beef bánh mì and a crumb embellishing the corner of his lip, chews between phrases. As a Dorchester local, he entered the shop with a gang of friends, cocking his head over his shoulder to tell them, “this is the best place ever.” He found out about Ba Le from a TikTok that asked, “is this the best sandwich in America?”

Like many other customers, Steven comes and goes without ever seeing the mural on the back wall hidden by a stack of boxes. Nguyen carefully removes them.

Ba Le’s back wall mural, once previously hidden by a stack of boxes, is now vividly displayed upon entry into Ba Le, featuring Nguyen and her family.

Painted in black and white is one of the most famous street markets in Vietnam called Bén Thành Market. Non las, leaf hats, line the background as an assembly of people crowd together on the streets. A horse pulls a carriage with passengers inside. Women with long hair and their silk tunics, ao dois, are frozen in rejoice. Bicycles and buggies pass them by.

In the lower right corner standing before baskets of bread gilded in warm yellow paint is Jennifer Nguyen. Extending her hand, she holds a bag of bánh mì, smiling.

“It was something I made with my hands from nothing,” she says. “And I think everyone can do that. It’s from what’s in the heart.”