“What’s for lunch,” I ask myself, every day, long before lunchtime.
Most days, lunch is obvious. There’s a new neighborhood sandwich shop or salad shop or burger shop that must be tried, or another cantina with this week’s entry in the “world’s greatest green chile” stakes, or yet another cupcake vendor that also serves sandwiches.
But some days, I have no craving, no compulsion, no clue. So I just get in the car. I turn the radio on, loud. I open the windows, wide. I give myself an hour, at least. And I let my steering wheel guide me where it will.
When it’s summertime, like it is now, I’m inevitably drawn, slowly and irresistibly, to Vinh Xuong. The tiny bakery, stuffed into a small corner of a Federal Boulevard strip mall, shares the parking lot with Pho dealers and Mexican grocers and home-country travel agents. Here I’ll survey assortments of baked buns and rice puddings and dried fruits and pastries, jockeying against toddlers and grandmothers for a clear shot at the impossibly small, impossibly friendly woman who takes sandwich orders.
I’ll request, as I always do, a bahn mi sandwich, then spend the five minute wait (every sandwich is made fresh) surveying the sodas and snacks. I’ll settle, as I always do, on a sugar cane soda and container of salted dried plums.
I’ll hand over a five-dollar bill, collect my change, and then I’ll head to the park. Any park, Confluence or City or Ruby Hill.
There, I’ll sit on a bench or on the ground. I’ll smush-press my plastic-wrapped bahn mi, a baguette which has been stuffed with pork and cabbage and cucumber and jalapeño and cilantro, compressing all the ingredients into a soft, supple, soulful sandwich, the very best kind.
Every bite will wobble between fiery jalapeño heat and chilly cucumber cool, between meaty pork sweetness and perky cilantro zing, and I’ll wash it down with the fizzy soda, too syrupy for most lunches but somehow perfect today. I’ll be languid, and I’ll like it.
Later, in the car on the way back to my desk, I’ll pop plums, one by one, taking one or two plums to get accustomed to their uncustomary (to my palate) but enchanting salty-sour-bitterness, then finishing them in a desperate front-seat flurry before I get back to my desk so I won’t have to share.
The rest of the day, I’ll have the memory of my private picnic, vivid in the way that only recent memories are. And by the time it fades, it’ll be lunchtime again.
Vinh Xuong Vietnamese Bakery
Sandwiches, snacks and baked goods. Take-away only. Lunch daily. 375 S. Federal Blvd. in the Far East Center, 303-922-4968
