The love of baguettes (and fake meats)

Today, I drove to San Jose to get some recordings for my thesis, which pretty much just involved me playing with adorable Asian children. The little dude who opened the door when I got to the house just went and hugged me right there without even knowing who I was - all together now, AWWWWW. So anyway, that went really well. Yay.

We finished up around 2:30, by which point I was pretty hungry, as the last thing I’d eaten was a freshly baked Milk Pail Market pain au chocolate I’d baked and then burned myself eating at 8:00 that morning, too impatient to wait for it to cool enough to eat safely. Totally worth the burn. (That wasn’t really relevant except as a teaser for the pain au chocolate smackdown post coming soon, in which the awesomeness of the Milk Pail frozen pains aux chocolate will be fully revealed. Get excited.)

Given that I was already in San Jose, home to a huge Vietnamese community, and given that banh mi are one of my favorite things ever (earlier banh mi posts here and here), banh mi for lunch it was. I first went to Than Son Hien Khanh, which I’d read good things about. When I stepped inside, it was packed with hungry Vietnamese people jostling each other to order, which was a good sign, but after several minutes of trying to decipher the menu board (knowing Vietnamese would have come in handy here), it seemed like the main things that they were selling were desserts, and I didn’t see a mention of banh mi anywhere.

Huh.

I am baffled as to why I thought that Than Son Hien Khanh had great banh mi. Reading fail. The desserts looked really good, but all I wanted was a banh mi, so I headed out to find it somewhere else. Right next door was a Lee’s Sandwiches, but, you know, it’s a chain…ehhhh. What to do?? I didn’t have my phone on me to call anyone to give me directions to a new banh mi place, but I figured that if I drove around long enough, I’d find a banh mi shop somewhere. After all, according to a sign on the road, I was in “Little Saigon”. 

And sure enough, about thirty seconds after I’d left the plaza, my keen falcon eyes spotted L’Amour Des Baguettes, “the love of baguettes”.  OMG I LOVE BAGUETTES! I LOVE BAGUETTES SO MUCH I ATE ONE LIKE EVERY DAY WHEN I WAS IN PARIS AND GAINED FIVE POUNDS THAT’S HOW MUCH I LOVE THEM THIS STORE LOVES BAGUETTES TOO SO THEY MUST BE AMAZING. That was pretty much my exact reaction.

Despite the confusing presence of Spanish on the sign that made me wonder if it was actually some weird French-Spanish bakery (…I just realized that I don’t think I’ve even ever had a Spanish baked good, weird) and not a Vietnamese bakery, I was just so excited to have found a place that shared my love of baguettes that I skipped into the bakery, only to stop and stare in confusion the minute I entered.

It…wasn’t what I’d expected at all. From both the exterior and from my previous experiences with Vietnamese places in San Jose, I’d been expecting a sort of shabby, cheap-looking store, but it was pretty much the complete opposite - everything was paneled in rich mahogany (if there had been books around, they would have been leather-bound), it looked and felt more it belonged in bougie Palo Alto than in a strip mall in San Jose, and there was club music blaring in the background. Sort of like the Abercrombie of Asian bakeries, except not douchey, just all delicious. (By the way, if anyone actually goes to L’Amour Des Baguettes, my description is probably off a bunch. This is just how I remember it, I don’t really know what that says about me. I was really hungry.)

Apparently, it’s mooncake season, and L’Amour Des Baguettes really went all out. Every counter was covered with little mountains of mooncakes in a huge variety of fillings, even a durian one. And even cooler, under elegant glass cake cases were generously-sized samples of every single mooncake! I’m a terrible judge of mooncakes, as I only had my first one last year and have eaten about three in my entire life, but I thought they tasted pretty good. Or maybe it was just because they were free.

After goggling at the mooncakes for a while, I decided that I didn’t know if I liked mooncakes enough to drop $5 for a single mooncake and decided to just get what I’d come for: BANH MI. While standing in line, a dude came by offering thick slices of some sausage-looking thing (they’re really cool about the sizes of their samples here), which turned out to actually be some sort of fish sausage, sort of like if the stuff that makes fish balls had been formed into a salami instead. It was actually pretty good, and I might try to pick one up the next time I make it over to L’Amour.

After spending a while trying to figure out which banh mi to get, I ended up choosing the BBQ pork banh mi, because how can you ever go wrong with red BBQ pork?

AHHHH REALLY GOOD. I would expect great bread from a place calling itself The Love of Baguettes, and they definitely backed that name up - I might have preferred the bread to be slightly crustier and to have more of a crackly outside, but it was as good of a Vietnamese baguette as any I’ve had. I like bread. And all carbs, really.

This banh mi wasn’t shy with the pork, which made up slightly more than half of the filling, and the pork itself was moist and full of red goodness. Yes, red, that’s what Asian BBQ tastes like. It’s like how grape soda tastes like purple. Mmmm, colors. 

The pickled vegetables are just as important to a banh mi as the meat, and these were pretty solid examples, providing tartness and crunch to balance out the porkiness. The butter/sauce brought everything together, and each bite reminded me of why I love banh mi - that perfect mix of contrasting French and Vietnamese flavors and textures that combine to make each bite a glorious celebration of globalization and world peace. It’s a deep sandwich.

While waiting for my banh mi to be made, this electric green pandan sponge cake called to me. It’s sort of hard to describe pandan flavor (or I’m just really bad at describing food), but it’s delicious. Not too sweet, light and soft, speckled with microscopic crunchy bits that made some bites reminiscent of cotton candy - I definitely didn’t need to be eating dessert today, but…I ate the whole thing.

Did I mention that the total cost for the forearm-sized banh mi and the huge pandan cake was $4.00 ($3.00 for the banh mi, $1.00 for the cake)? SO GOOD. If only L’Amour Des Baguettes wasn’t all the way in San Jose…*sigh*.

Later that night, Yi wanted to go out for dinner and suggested Garden Fresh, the vegan Chinese place in Palo Alto. I’d heard lots of good things about it and had actually been craving American Chinese food recently after reading Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (really good, btw), so I was pretty excited to finally try takeout classics made with fake meats.

The really sweet owner of Garden Fresh recognized Yi from his last visit and, after a long, good-natured back-and-forth in Chinese between her, Yi and Jono (I just sat in the corner and smiled at everyone), she came back with complimentary bowls of soup! I had hot-and-sour soup, which I always love to get at American Chinese places. Mmmm. Soup.

We shared three dishes between the three of us, which came with brown rice on the side (white rice is also available upon request).

Ribs in brown sauce (an interesting article about brown sauce from earlier this summer). LOOKS LIKE MEAT, RIGHT? The mushroom-based “ribs” actually tasted pretty close to real meat too, sort of like a stringier version that wasn’t as heavy as normal. 

As with most cases of General Tso’s chicken (this actually seems more like sweet-and-sour pork to me than the General Tso’s I’ve had, but the menu calls this “General’s Veggie Chicken”), the crispy fried shell and sweet-and-sour sauce overpowered any sense of what was actually under the breading (in this case, soy chicken), and it just tasted really familiar and comforting, fried meat covered with gloopy, radioactive orange sauce.

The final dish we got was this grilled veggie salmon, made from tofu skins. I actually liked the sauce for this dish (described as “Chef’s Special Sauce”) the most of the three we had, although the best that I can describe it as right now is “brown with garlic” (really showing off my writing skills right here), and the “salmon” actually had a bit of a fish flavor to it. Like the ribs, the texture was a bit stringy, but that’s not to say that it’s a bad texture (I actually like it), just one that I don’t experience that often.

Including tip and tax, we spent $15 each, which is a bit pricey for takeout Chinese, but pretty standard for Palo Alto dining. I do have a weird fondness for brown sauce/glowing orange sauce Chinese food, and I’ll probably make a couple return visits to Garden Fresh while I’m still here since fake meat Chinese has to be healthier than normal takeout. Okay, fine, it’s probably not at all, but DON’T SHATTER THE ILLUSION FOR ME, OKAY?? LET ME EAT MY FAKE MEATS IN IGNORANT BLISS.

After dinner, we walked around downtown for a bit, Jono got a cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory, and I bought Band-Aids (I cut myself really badly cutting onions a couple days ago, and it’s still bleeding…oops) at Walgreens. While checking out, I spotted Coconut M&Ms, which I’d never seen before, so I threw in a pack of those too. The clerk bamboozled me into buying two more packages to take advantage of the 3 for $2 deal, and I say bamboozled because Coconut M&Ms are kind of gross - they taste like sunscreen. I was expecting something more like Almond Joy, which is one of my favorites, but ughhh, not your best work M&Ms.

Crispy M&Ms, where have you gone?

ADDRESSES

L’Amour Des Baguettes
1181 Story Road, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 275-6868

Garden Fresh
460 Ramona Street, Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 462-9298