Special banh mi at Caphe House
This post is a little later than expected, apologies. My trip to Germany kind of got in the way.
I ended up at Caphe House by accident one Saturday afternoon. Back in September, I was asked to judge the bake-off at the Bermondsey Street Festival with my Band of Bakers co-founder Naomi. I don’t know if you’ve ever considered the practicalities of judging a cake competition, but you end up consuming an awful lot of sugar. We had a plan to taste just one bite of each cake, but some were so good, I ended up going back for seconds, and even thirds, fourths and fifths of the winning cake. With the wide eyes and slightly manic demeanour of a child that’s overindulged on e-numbers, I went on the hunt for some savoury food to try to counteract the sugar.
The Bermondsey Street Festival has grown considerably since I first visited in 2009 and now has a huge street food section, with many vans pitching up for the day and a number of the local restaurants setting up their own stalls. There were a couple of beer-and-burger deals, including one from The Woolpack, one of my favourite Bermondsey pubs, but the queues were colossal. With neither my husband or myself willing to wait that long, I suggested we instead go for a banh mi.
Although there are more Vietnamese restaurants south of the river than there used to be, most are still concentrated around the Kingsland Road in Shoreditch. Caphe House is more cafe than restaurant, with a few menu items focusing around baguettes, soup and salads, rather than the pages and pages of menu you find in the east. Their speciality is authentic Vietnamese coffee, which becomes an obsession for anybody lucky enough to have visited Vietnam. I like mine with ice and a lot of condensed milk.
Another obsession that followed me back was banh mi. Both my husband and I ordered the special banh mi, which is pork and pate – one of the most common types you will find in Vietnam. The pork and pork pate have a deep flavour, despite the pork looking perhaps a little pale and the bread, although not the traditional rice flour baguettes, was both crispy and light. What I liked the most was that the sandwich was packed full with pickled carrot, daikon and onions and topped with a generous amount of red chilli. I have had far too many banh mis that lack both the acidity and the heat that comes from these items, but this one had those flavours in abundance. The service was a little sketchy and we had to wait a while, but what the hell.
Caphe House, 114 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TX
Six Hundred and Seven Square Miles 