Sandwiches and James Franco

I think we can all agree that sandwiches are kind of awesome. It’s not really the portability that gets me, because I’m usually sitting down anyway when I’m enjoying a sandwich, but rather the made-in-heaven marriage of bread and filling that makes for endless parties in your mouth, their simplicity and unfussiness, the satisfying feeling of getting a bit of every part of a dish with a single bite that makes you feel like a giant…maybe the last one’s just me.

See, sandwiches are like James Franco - they can be classic (BLT, James Franco as James Dean in James Dean), cheesy (philly cheesesteaks, James Franco’s trademark cheesing smile), serious (Dagwoods, James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in Howl), random and out-of-nowhere (fluffernutters, James Franco as James Franco on…General Hospital?) and they can go great with milk (PB&J, Scott Smith in Milk…ooh that’s a bad one). Just as James Franco is criminally underappreciated (What James Franco Did Today is a start, at least), so too is the humble sandwich too often ignored and left as an afterthought.

James Franco is not afraid to display his feelings over how awesome sandwiches are

So today’s post is all about sandwiches. After finishing reading this, you should probably go eat a sandwich. And then watch a James Franco movie.

If it walks like a sandwich, and talks like a sandwich…

Burgers exist in a sort of weird zone where they’re just thought of as burgers, and not necessarily sandwiches. But since I’m such a rebel, like James Franco as Daniel Derosario in the cancelled-too-early Freaks and Geeks, I’m going to say that burgers are sandwiches too. Breaking. All. The. Rules.

Friday, Matt wanted to go to SliderBar on University, and since I’m always down for eating food that makes me feel like a giant (come on, I can’t be the only one), SliderBar it was.

I got a Summer BBQ Deal Meal (probably not the actual name) of two pulled pork sliders, a little cup of potato salad, and a raspberry lemonade, and I also added a classic breakfast slider, the total coming out to around $11. The pulled pork had a bit of a funky smell, just like James Franco’s character Saul Silver in Pineapple Express most likely had a funky smelling apartment, being a pot dealer and all, and it was only about as good as the pulled pork that Stanford Dining puts out, but I just really dig pulled pork, so I liked it fine. The potato salad was okay, not too mayonnaise-heavy, which is always a plus, but nothing fantastic either. The breakfast slider was just a more expensive, more poorly done version of a egg and bacon McMuffin, and I definitely would have been happier with one of those - the English muffin was overtoasted, almost crunchy, the bacon was as soggy as most fast food bacon, and the egg was overcooked and was just there. I love breakfast sandwiches, so this was really disappointing, like Spiderman 3, which was just really bad and killed off James Franco’s Harry Osborn.

And so, SliderBar becomes just the latest overpriced and underdelivering restaurant on University. How great would it be if it changed places with Castro…if only Ellen Page were here to do crazy street-bending shit with her mind. INCEPTION.

Luckily, the next day I picked myself up from the sandwich disappointment at SliderBar with… 

Banh Mi! Banh Mi! Banh Mi!

It wasn’t until this past winter that I had my first banh mi, and in Paris of all places. Although, given that banh mi came out of French colonialism in Vietnam, and France has the most amazing bread, it was probably actually a decent place to have my first banh mi.

A lot of the banh mi I had were just okay, until I stumbled upon a tiny one-room shack in the 3rd arrondissement during my last two weeks and had the best sandwich ever. I don’t know if any sandwich will ever come close to that one, but I’ll go pretty far to try and find one. Just like James Franco is now a crazy king-of-all-trades, banh mi stretch themselves to be the best of French and Vietnamese sandwich arts. They’re just crazy delicious.

How far would I go to get a great banh mi? THIS FAR. 

Well, maybe not that far, but when I heard about great banh mi in San Jose, the 20 miles to San Jose seemed reasonable, especially if we ended up doing other stuff there to make the trip worthwhile. So yesterday, when we decided we wanted to see Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, which, despite its lack of James Franco, was super fun and creative and crazy and something more people should see, we decided to go watch it in San Jose so that we could get banh mi afterwards. 

We were planning on going to a movie theater just a mile away from Huong Lan Sandwich, but we made a wrong turn, eventually finding ourselves at the Great Mall in Milpitas. We saw a movie theater there and found that we were just in time for the next showing of Scott Pilgrim, so we stopped there and settled in for a really fun two hours (seriously, go see it, now). Despite James Franco’s presence in Eat Pray Love, we weren’t especially tempted to make it a double feature, and so after the movie, we decided to walk around the mall a bit; none of us had ever been to the Great Mall and you don’t get away with calling yourself “the Great Mall” unless you can back it up, so a short walkabout seemed like a good idea. That turned into two hours of shopping, because the Great Mall is apparently an indoor outlet mall and I’m always down for outlets, and by the time we got out, we were all pretty hungry.

We got lost again trying to get to Huong Lan, but we eventually made it there, and I was instantly hooked in by its worn shabbiness and quirky convenience store-sandwich shop setup, with Vietnamese products and snacks stacked high on tables all around us. I ordered a grilled pork banh mi and a bbq pork banh mi, both $2.50, which came out pretty quickly.

These sandwiches were good. Good enough to make me forget my newly acquired knowledge from Scott Pilgrim that bread makes you fat (GO SEE IT), good enough to create several minutes of non-awkward silence while we munched on banh mi, good enough to cause us to each buy another one to take home with us for the next day. Not quite as good as The One in Paris, but still really good.

I liked the slightly juicier grilled pork (bottom picture) a little better than the bbq pork, but they were both great and the difference between the two wasn’t huge, just like the difference between Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, which, like the aforementioned bomb Spider-Man 3, feature James Franco as Harry Osborn. Warm, toasted Vietnamese baguettes holding slightly fatty pork slices and slightly sweet pickled carrots and daikon matchsticks that tempered the heat of jalapenos, with a little freshness added by cilantro - SO GOOD. I MISSED YOU BANH MI.

So yeah. Sandwiches are pretty awesome.

SliderBar Cafe
324 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 322-7300

Huong Lan Sandwich
1655 Tully Road, San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 258-8868