Corner Bakery sent out an e-mail to those who subscribe to its e-mails a few days ago. It was offering its new sandwich free by appointment. The free offer is long gone. The appointments filled up in about a few hours time. I got mine in under the wire, but I realized as I gazed upon the picture of this sandwich that it looks an awful lot like banh mi.
There's the cilantro, the carrots, the cucumbers and yes, the jalapeño even though fresh peppers instead of pickled are used in banh mis.
And there's what it's calling it: Spicy Asian Pork Sandwich.
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I've yet to taste the sandwich (my appointment isn't until next week), but if it is supposed to be a banh mi, this may be the first American chain (if I'm not mistaken) to try its hand in offering what we all have been going to Little Saigon to eat (and Lee's) for years now.
The closest we came was when Dylan Ho of the Eat, Drink, and Be Merry food blog did a post teasing that Subway is offering “The Bammy”, its version of banh mi. Actually, it wasn't. Ho just brought banh mi ingredients to a Subway in attempt to transform his usual Footlong into something Vietnamese, and then made up some parody graphics. But he gave us hope that banh mi was close to crossing over.
And let's remember that Ho was the blogger that had the forethought of putting Korean meat into a taco, and that his blog about the act inspired Kogi…
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.