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”. 

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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.

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Come on food, shift, shift back to good again - Pho Vi Hoa, Los Altos

This is a very late post.

On Friday the 14th we went to Hot Pot City. I Takeru Kobayashi’d my way through a mountain of beef balls but left the HPC feeling surprisingly well, an excellent change from the disgustingly stuffed feeling I normally get after an all-you-can-eat challenge.

On Saturday the 15th I woke up feeling miserable. Bloated, urpy, I just didn’t want to think about food at all. I knew that our summer session friends, who were leaving the day after, would likely want to have one last dinner with us, so I spent the day concentrating and gathering my strength to eat.

When it came time to choose a place to eat, I was feeling better but the thought of greasy, heavy food still made me ill, so I was elated when someone suggested pho and everyone was up for it. James wasn’t very hungry either, so we decided to split dinner, and we started with a summer roll appetizer.

The summer rolls were just fine; not the best summer rolls I’ve ever had, but not the worst either. The peanut sauce that accompanied the rolls was a bit sweet but I liked it anyway, and it was nice to start with something light and fresh.

For our main, James and I split a rice vermicelli bowl with chicken, shrimp, and egg rolls. The chicken was well-seasoned and moderately juicy, the egg rolls were serviceable and crispy, and the accompanying sauce that we poured over the noodles added much needed moisture to the noodles, but the best part of the dish was the shrimps. There were only two shrimps, so James and I each got one, but that one shrimp was the single-best shrimp I’d had in a very long time - big, meaty, nicely grilled, delicious shrimp. Otherwise, though, the dish was just okay, and if I return to Pho Vi Hoa I’ll probably just order a pho. With a heaping side order of shrimps.

I’ve made Pho Vi Hoa sound pretty decent, so why the downer of a title for this post, besides wanting to make a “clever” reference to one of my favorite songs? This post is late because, lately, I haven’t really wanted to write here all that much. Hot Pot City, Ryowa, even Pasta?, all the recent restaurants I’ve been to have been okay and worth return visits, but I just haven’t been able to feel satisfied after a meal recently. I can eat good food and feel full, but there’s just something missing.

Starting at about the same time I picked up this emptiness, I’ve been thinking more and more about food, the food I love but haven’t been able to get at Stanford. I want a gigantic bowl of jjajjangmyeon. I want real pizza (California pizza…*shakes head* that’s a whole post in itself). I want some Dinosaur Barbeque, I want a Gray’s Papaya hot dog, I want Gam Mee Ok, I want muffins and “tiramisu” from Wegmans, I want my mom’s cooking. It’s not so much that I can’t get good food here (I do, after all, live an hour outside of San Francisco), but rather that I want this food. Unfortunately, all of those things are back home or on the east coast, and I won’t be home again until Christmas.

But. I can find a bowl of jjajjangmyeon. That I can do. My work finishes in a week, and then I have three free weeks until school starts, three weeks to find that perfect soul-satisfying bowl of jjajjangmyeon to hold me over until I can go home again.