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The Banh Mi and the Poboy

Two sandwiches strengthen their bonds in New Orleans

by

Brei Olivier

On the back patio of Banh Mi Boys sandwich shop in Metairie, a mural is visible to drivers coming down Airline Drive. What they see, for just a second, is the Golden Bridge of Da Nang, Vietnam merging into New Orleans’ Crescent City Connection; the banh mi (or bánh mì) on one side, waits to meets the poboy, on the other. 

“Together, it makes ‘banh mi boys,’” said owner Peter Nguyen. The mural reflects his mission to highlight similarities between the two famous sandwiches as well as get people interested in a Vietnamese food beyond pho. “Its symbolic of bridging both cultures together,” he added.

Nguyen is young. The New Orleans native was just 26 when he opened Banh Mi Boys alongside his parents’ Texaco station. Originally from Vietnam, they were skeptical of him playing with tradition, doing something like pairing fried shrimp with cilantro and pickled daikon radish. 

“It’s kind of hard for them … to take a stab at touching something so deep within the culture that has for years been the same way,” he said. 

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True, the flavors of Southeast Louisiana and Southeast Asia aren’t commonly found together. As Justin Kennedy, general manager and head chef at Parkway Bakery and Tavern, puts it, “If you put hoisin sauce on a roast beef sandwich, people throw it back at you.”

But just take a bite, and you’ll come around to Nguyen’s argument: these sandwiches are kin. 

It begins with a baguette. 

The bread

The French landed in Louisiana in 1682, then in Vietnam in 1858. With each arrival, they brought their boats, their guns, and, of course, their bread.

Bread is not only a cornerstone of French cuisine, but, in colonial times, it was a centerpiece of daily life as well. As they embarked on their imperialistic conquests, bread was not something the French intended to go without. 

As they embarked on their imperialistic conquests, bread was not something the French intended to go without. 

The conditions in Vietnam and the American Gulf South were starkly different from what the French were used to. Humid climates are not conducive to growing wheat, so the crucial ingredient had to be imported, explained Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and the National Food & Beverage Foundation. During the time of colonization, this was expensive, and, in Louisiana, wheat frequently arrived full of weevils and mold. 

To compensate, Louisiana bakers made a wetter dough, using more water and less flour. In Vietnam, bakers substituted rice flour for part of the wheat flour, mixing the grains together. 

While not the same bread, both new versions of French bread were lighter and fluffier, making them easier to chew and more absorbent of juices from anything slathered on them. 

[You might like: Bellegarde Bakery spreads the gospel of good bread.]

“It may not make better bread, depending on how you define bread, but it’s definitely the kind of bread that makes a better sandwich,” said Williams. 

The sandwich 

In 1929, the poboy made a quick ascent. According to local lore, it all started when New Orleans’ unionized streetcar drivers went on strike after the companies started hiring non-union drivers. 

The Martin brothers, ex-streetcar workers themselves, fed the strikers sandwiches for free. When one approached, they would holler, “Here come another poor boy.” The cumbersome “poor boy” was eventually shortened to “poboy.” 

The original poboy was stuffed with scraps. Meat was expensive, so the Martin brothers mixed pot roast gravy with fried potatoes and roast beef shards to create the effect of a filling, meaty sandwich without much actual flesh. Its purpose was to feed hungry men quickly and cheaply.

The brothers worked with Sicilian baker John Gendusa to create a new bun for the sandwich, one that was longer and more uniformly shaped so it could be easily cut into multiple, equal-length poboys, something impossible to do with traditional football shape of a baguette. Thus, today’s version of the New Orleans poboy bun was born. 

[Read this: The Italian history of the French Quarter.]

In a story published in 2016 called “The Messy History of the Poboy,” the Times-Picayune noted some chronistic issues with this origin story, including an autobiographical note by jazz great Sidney Bechet, telling of a night on the town when he tried “those sandwiches, ‘Poor Boys’ they’re called—a half loaf of bread split open and stuffed with ham” in the 1910s. Regardless, by the mid-twentieth century, the sandwich was a widely recognized staple of the city. 

The banh mi, on the other hand, grew gradually. It appeared in the 1950s, when, as Andrew Lam writes in The Cairo Review, the Vietnamese gave the French bread a name in their own language and began to experiment with what they put inside it. Originally, they called it bánh tây, which means western-style bread. Later, it lost its western denotation and became banh mi, wheat bread. 

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Tuyet Takacs, founder of Pho Tau Bay in New Orleans, said this experimentation began in North Vietnam, where she was born and the French originally settled, then descended south, picking up new flavors as it passed from city to city. In Vietnam, it’s common for cities to have a signature dish, such as the familiar soup Bun Bo Hue, of Hue, or Cao Lau, a noodle dish of Hoi An.

By the time Vietnam War ended, in 1975, the banh mi was common throughout the country. 

Layering flavors is important in Vietnamese cuisine, so the sandwich inevitably developed a more complex taste than the slapdash poboy. This layering is not simply a texture preference, but a philosophy. To each meal, Vietnamese cooks apply Mahabhuta, the Buddhist principle of five elements, accounting for five traditional spices, nutrients, and colors as well as the five senses. The concept of yin and yang, on loan from the Chinese, calls for balance between the flavor of the meal and the environment, taking into consideration season and weather. 

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Think of Vietnamese fish sauce, which adds bitter lemon zest, sour lemon juice, sweet sugar, and hot pepper to salty fermented fish. Each ingredient alone might be pungent, but together they sing. 

Both sandwiches became working class staples, with banh mi peddled out of carts on street corners and poboys a darling of New Orleans’ corner stores. Bread is cheap and, at the time, the ingredients were too, typically fresh and easy to obtain. 

Today, the standard poboy has a dressing of lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayonnaise  and is stuffed with either seafood—often fried—or roast beef. 

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A banh mi’s dressing consists of cilantro, cucumber, jalapeño, pickled carrots, and pickled daikon with a fish sauce or flavored mayonnaise that can vary from sandwich to sandwich. The most foundational banh mi has pork—sometimes up to three different kinds as is the case with the Bánh Mí Dac Biet—but can also include chicken, fish, egg, tofu, or pork. 

Nguyen, Kennedy, and Takacs agree on one thing: the most important ingredient of each sandwich is the bread.

“By looking, right when it hits the table, the bread is what stands out to me more than anything,” said Kennedy. “I can tell right off the bat if it’s New Orleans or not.”

They also agreed that—despite its shared French origins—banh mi bread cannot be substituted for the New Orleans poboy bread, or vice versa. Poboy bread comes in a long loaf cut into pieces. Banh mi bread is a smaller pistolette. They each specifically evolved to match the flavor of their ingredients. 

They each specifically evolved to match the flavor of their ingredients. 

Banh mi bread is more flavorful, with a buttery taste that can stand up to the more intense and varied Vietnamese flavors. If used for a poboy, Kennedy said, it hijacks the taste, masking the other flavors. Likewise, he said, the taste of a New Orleans French bread falls flat when loaded up as banh mi.

The reunion

After the Vietnam War ended, many of the South Vietnamese who fled to the United States settled in New Orleans.  In 1982, Takacs and her family joined her husband there. 

After a few years in the United States, the couple opened a restaurant on the Westbank Expressway (now located at 1565 Tulane Ave.), naming it after her father’s restaurant chain in Vietnam, Pho Tau Bay. 

Not long after, said Takacs, Pho Tau Bay served the first banh mi in New Orleans. 

To market the sandwich, they drew a parallel to the local cuisine, and called it a “Vietnamese poboy.” 

The Vietnamese have since made a name for themselves in the New Orleans baking scene. Vietnamese-owned Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery has become one the preeminent suppliers of the bread. 

Likewise, the “Vietnamese poboy” has appeared on restaurant menus throughout New Orleans. Kennedy served his version of a braised lemongrass pork banh mi at last year’s Oak Street Po-boy Festival. Red Fish Grill, which won the same festival, served a fried catfish version of the Vietnamese sandwich. 

“I see a lot places calling them a banh mi poboy.” Kennedy said. “ ... I think that’s fine because to me it is a poboy. It is a type of a poboy sandwich. It’s all the same, it’s just a different twist. Just a different culture.” 

In the hands of a younger generation, the poboy and the banh mi are twisting once again—reacquainting themselves, and having new conversations on old traditions. 

“I like to be creative in everything I do,” said Nguyen. “The banh mi is kind of like an empty canvas for me.”

Nguyen uses his menu to introduce New Orleans to new flavors from around the world, all served, familiarly enough, on French bread. There’s the Spicy Asian BBQ Brisket Banh Mi with 24-hour smoked brisket good enough to bring to Passover. The Bang Bang Shrimp Banh Mi, fried shrimp with banh mi style dressing, nods to the poboy. The more adventurous lovers of fried shrimp on bread can try the Honey Sriracha Shrimp Banh Mi. 

“I like to be creative in everything I do,” said Nguyen. “The banh mi is kind of like an empty canvas for me.”

A sense of community has arisen around these sandwiches. Jason Gendusa, owner at John Gendusa Bakery and the original owner’s great-grandson, said the bakeries who supply the bread work together to support each other in their small industry. “You never know when you might need somebody,” said Gendusa. “We actually needed some ingredients from [Dong Phuong] one night. Our supplier was out of them and we called and they very graciously took care of us.”

Dong Phuong and John Gendusa Bakery, with Leidenheimer Baking Company and a few others, produce tens of thousands of sandwich buns daily, said Gendusa. A portion of these sandwiches will undoubtedly be someone’s introduction, a first taste of a poboy or a banh mi that acts a first step into a new culture. 

“If you’re curious, come try,” said Takacs. 

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