Caphe House’s Special Banh Mi

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

Korrito’s Pork and Kimchi Fried Rice Korean Burrito

Pork and kimchi-fried rice Korean burrito from Korrito

If you’re pulling a face right now at the idea of a Korean burrito then you’re looking at this all wrong.  Forget any ideas you have about the traditional burrito:  forget spiced meat, black beans, rice, guacamole and salsa.  Think instead of a burrito as a method rather than an item.  Now start thinking of all of the good parts of Korean food:  barbecued meats, spicy rice, kimchi and chilli.  Wrap these up in the way that you would a burrito…. Now you have the idea.

One of the beautiful things about street food is the freedom to create an innovative menu or product without the financial risk involved in setting up a restaurant.  This means that some of London’s most creative food offerings are to be found in its street markets.  Fusion is a huge part of this, and it can either work really well, or it can fail miserably.

Thankfully, there’s a bit of a precedent for the Korean burrito.  The Kogi BBQ truck in Los Angeles has been experimenting with this kind of Korean-Mexican fusion for years, drawing influence from the city’s biggest immigrant populations.  Korrito, London’s first example of this kind of fusion, was started by two Korean siblings.  Every time I see this stall set up, usually behind the Royal Festival Hall on the south bank, there is always a long queue, showing that Londoners are also on board.

The operation is fairly straightforward:  you choose a meat (pork belly, beef or chicken), a type of rice (steamed or kimchi-fried) and then whether you want this made into a burrito, rice box or salad box.  Each combination costs no more than £6.50.  They make everything in a kind of production line.  First the rice (KIMCHI-FRIED PLEASE), then the meat (PORK PLEASE) and then the additions (YES TO CORIANDER, CHILLI AND CHEESE PLEASE).  It’s wrapped up, you pay, that’s it.

It does indeed look like a burrito, but the flavour inside is pure Seoul.  The belly pork is both sweet and spicy with the usual strips of crispy meat and fat, and there is plenty of it.  The rice is also spicy, with a subtle pungency from the kimchi.  The cheese, that I thought would clash with the other ingredients, added no more than a very subtle creaminess against the other flavours.  The heat from the pork and the rice, combined with the sprinkle of red chilli added at the end made for a very spicy wrap indeed.  For a milder burrito, I would switch out the kimchi-fried rice for the plain rice and leave out the extra chilli.

Chi’s Char Siu Pork Banh Mi

Char siu pork banh mi from Chi, Fitzrovia

Ever since I made a trip to Vietnam five years ago I have been on the hunt for a good banh mi.    Whilst staying in a hotel in Saigon that overlooked the main road, we would be woken up every morning by the sound of a woman shouting “Banh Mi! Banh Mi!”  We would then wander, hungry and bleary eyed, down to the street for our breakfast.  Her set up was incredibly simple:  a hot plate built over a motorbike, a couple of knives, a few tupperwares containing the rest of her ingredients, and a basket of rice flour baguettes.  A baguette filled with pickled carrot and daikon, a lot of chilli, a slick of pate and a fried egg was enough to shake off any hangover from the night before.

The banh mi is a product of the French colonisation of Vietnam.  Baguettes and coffee are as ubiquitous here as noodles, and can be found all over the country in various forms.  Such a European-inspired element of Vietnamese food was easily transferable to the culture-hungry diners of London.  Fortunately my return to London coincided with both the explosion of street food in London, so I never had to look too hard for a banh mi.  In more recent years, these have been so popular as to move off the street and into permanent cafes.

It was a tube strike that brought me into contact with Chi through a morning walk from Kings Cross to Oxford Circus on a previously unknown street.  I made a mental note of its location and went back at lunchtime.  It is a small cafe, sparsely decorated in the same way as the Vietnamese restaurants you would find on the Kingsland Road.  By the window is a small bench and there is one two-seat table.  Each time I have since been in there, there has been a few people eating in and a bit of a queue – mostly office workers.  They have a small menu, mostly of banh mi, but of a few noodle dishes as well.  There are a number of different banh mi on available, priced at £3.50 for a regular sized baguette, or £4.50 for a large.

The char siu pork baguette contains a few slices of the sweet roasted pork, warmed up as needed, topped with a generous amount of pickled daikon and carrot, some chopped parsley and coriander, and a scarlet slick of Sriracha.  The flavours from this banh mi are actually very good, the vegetables are nicely pickled and the flavour of the pork comes through well against them.  For me, it could use a lot more chilli.  I know that the western palate is not always amenable to heat, but this had barely any.  Even a second helping of Sriracha did not do the job that a handful of finely chopped red chillies would do.  Having this as an option would improve the banh mi immeasurably.  I’m not even going to get into the whole issue of rice flour baguettes as I have never come across anywhere that uses them.  Apparently there are hardly any wholesalers in London.  Somebody has definitely missed a trick there.

Chi, 168 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6YX.