sounds good Dave! during the pandemic I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to formulate and bake banh mi rolls, very difficult to get the crust just right. Gave me a newfound appreciation of the sandwich.
Apparently if I’m not placed on a jury today, I may be dismissed in which case I may scuttle back to westchester. I’ll post here eod.
best,
thats interesting - I have never tried to bake them, but understood, possibly wrongly, that the preferred rolls have some rice flour in them for crispiness, like at our Brooklyn fave, Ba Xuyen. We had a local vietnamese place open and unfortunately they are using heavy sourdough rolls. Yuck! Wil be interested which of the Chinatown vietnamese are best if you go.
living in westchester during the pandemic, the only way we were going to eat banh mi was for me to bake the rolls. if you’re interested in making them, a chef friend of mine recommended Andrea Nguyen’s banh mi handbook. Unfortunately, I didn’t know of the book prior to running a lot of experiments and got close enough that I didn’t bother purchasing the book.
It helps to have an oven with steam injection but there are various methods of creating steam in a home oven. I used bread flour for these, there’s also milk and butter in the dough.
best,
Darn (not that I would wish you an extended jury duty), but I was also called for this week, just before I went away and postponed till February. Was hoping you would report back about some of these choices! But at least I will have all of this to “look forward” to when I serve.
I have generally had success with Andrea Nguyen’s recipes.
Her banh min roll recipe is online if you don’t have the book, and there’s got a post on her website about her experiments with it.
long line for lunch for bo ky, decided to take dave’s recommendation of green garden village because , well, when does dave ever get it wrong? also, i liked the look of the roast pig he posted, usually I ask for it lean and the response falls somewhere between “you’ll take what we give you” and “another crazy person trying to reduce fat intake while ordering roast pig”.
the restaurant was crowded, my offer to sit at a communal table ignored, instead they sat me at a two top which unfortunately was in the flow of people waiting for tables and takeout. I’ve come to realize other cultures have a different sense of allowable space between people and at times it felt like i was about to share my chair with two or three other people. after a very long five minutes, I picked up my food and sat at one of the communal tables.
$8.50 brought a two meat lunch of roast pig and soy sauce chicken served over rice with Chinese broccoli that easily could have fed two. the chicken was good, the ginger sauce great and the roast pig perfectly cooked, juicy and lean. well, lean for roast pig, my only complaint was lack of the beautiful, crispy, salty skin pictured in dave’s photo.
digressing for a moment, i’ll never forget the mixture of horror and pride I felt when our then three year old daughter sweetly declared to her doctor that fried chicken skin was her favorite food. I managed to ignore the doctor glaring at me like I was a serial killer mostly out of fear he was going to ask for her second favorite food which most certainly would have been smoked pork skin. come to think of it, horror and pride is a pretty good summation of my whole parenting experience 
unfortunately I wasn’t paneled for a jury and was excused eod. still full from lunch, i managed to gobble down some cheap, bad dumplings and took home an egg tart and a portugese tart from tai pan. it’s passing strange that their portugese tart is so good but their egg tart is just middle of the road.
so no banh mi taste off with dave 
, hopefully @ninkat and others will update this thread with their jury duty eats.
best,
Ugh with the typos
good taste even at 3, and great parenting
that’s the first time i’ve been accused of good parenting 
otoh, she did write a successful admissions essay about her experience competing in bbq contests with me, so there’s that.
So, I finally served my two days jury duty this week…ate lunch at Dim Sum Go Go and Golden Unicorn. Hadn’t eaten at the latter in years (we had my son’s bar mitzvah party there).
Anyway, Dim Sum Go Go: pork pot stickers, shrimp rice rolls, and shrimp pan fried noodles. Wish I had gotten more dim sum. The two were excellent!!! Thin wrappers, tasty insides. The pork one was with cabbage; they had the more familiar version also, but I couldn’t eat more.
Had four plates of dim sum from Golden Unicorn. Very meh! Pork dumplings, shrimp rice rolls, shrimp dumplings, fried shrimp with bacon. One just more meh than the next. The fried shrimp were cold. Thick wrappers, and everything had a funny taste to it. Can’t identify. I have pictures. Will post later, if you want. Gotta get out with the pup!
