Have you ever taken a bite so flavorful that it totally overwhelmed your senses? Just for a moment you were completely unable to perceive anything but the flavors in your mouth? Layer upon layer of flavor and texture taking control over your nervous system for an instant, flooding the mind with sparks of joy. A moment of such sensory overload that while the flavors fade the memory of them lingers for months, years. A bite so perfect that it diminishes your enjoyment of a certain food forever because no one can ever replicate the perfection you once experienced.
I’ve experienced a few bites like these, but the one that stands above the rest was my first bite of the most perfect sandwich to grace the planet earth; a pork and duck pate banh mi from Banh Mi Keu Deli in London’s SoHo district. Squatting on the slightly damp, cold, stone step of a darkened building across a thin street from a closed and gated park, I took the bite that changed my life.
Kicked out of our four-bed hostel room by our friends for their date night, my friend Magdalena and I had stumbled upon Banh Mi Keu Deli as we wandered somewhat aimlessly through the city in search of adventure, excitement, or a good meal. Striking out on the first two, we found the third. With high illuminated windows revealing a delightfully chic interior filled to the brim with couples and groups hunched over sandwiches and bowls of pho, we knew immediately from the size of the crowd inside and the line extending onto the sidewalk from the green painted door that we had encountered a gem.
Twenty minutes later, sitting on the stone stoop as drunk posh couples stumbled by, leaving fancy restaurants for another drink at an upscale bar, I silently handed Magdalena the sandwich with a look in my eyes that communicated everything she needed to know about the bite she was about to taste. The baguette was crunchy and firm enough to resist the tooth at first before exploding into the mouth, giving way to perfectly layered vegetables, nestled against tender pork and slathered with aioli and pate. Usually when I first bite into a sandwich I am immediately thrown into a desperate battle to keep the many components in their original alignment on the bread as each piece tries desperately to escape. Gathering the fleeing elements of my sandwich hinders my ability to enjoy and experience.
But not here, on this London step my sandwich took care of itself and I was free to consume the complexity and power of its flavor in its entirety. So often a sandwich is too dry or it drips and leaks when moisture is added. This banh mi had perfectly distributed moisture throughout in such a way that every aspect was just wet enough to join together without being so wet as to slip and slide. Never have I experienced such perfect culinary engineering and construction, allowing me to taste and experience every aspect simultaneously, uninhibited.
Passing the sandwich back and forth between us, Magdalena and I reveled in the flavors together. Delighted in our experience, we vowed to share it with as many people as we could, agreeing that we had to bring our friends back to the deli for lunch the next day before our train ride north. Raving all night to our friends about the divine excellence of our banh mi, we were crushed and disappointed the next day when they simply enjoyed their sandwiches at lunch. We searched their eyes for the same ecstasy we had experienced the night before to no avail. They assured us that the banh mi were excellent, but they didn’t quite understand our obsession.
Perhaps we were just unusually hungry that night, perhaps whoever made our sandwich wasn’t there the next day with their exceptional expertise, or perhaps we had just been touched by the divine as we sat on those cold damp steps, gifted an experience to last a lifetime.
