If you venture into the backstreets of Nha Trang city, directly behind the Sheraton hotel, you’ll find a few Vietnamese bun sandwich food carts.
At first, you may be skeptical at the thought of eating ‘street food’ in Asia. Fret not, street food can be delicious, and safe on your stomach and your wallet. We spent 4 consecutive weeks in South East Asia and neither of us had the bad fortune of ‘tummy problems’. The trick is to eat where the locals eat. If a particular restaurant, cafe or food cart is busy with local patronage, then you have a good chance of not only munching on something scrumptious, but also being relatively free from food poisoning.
Take the banh mi sandwich cart, for example. Banh mi is a Vietnamese style submarine sandwich on a French style baguette. Slightly different from a tradition French baguette in that the bread is made from wheat and a high proportion of rice flour. The sandwich itself includes thinly sliced pickled carrots and daikon radish, cucumbers, cilantro, chili peppers, pâté, mayonnaise, and various meat fillings of pork, Vietnamese sausage, chicken, head cheese or ham.
Here it is, the finished banh mi in all it’s glory. The baguette bread was incredibly fresh and still slightly warm from the oven. All the other toppings are underneath the mystery meat. The best part of this yummy sandwich was that it only cost us approximately 40 cents USD. I assume if we had ventured even further away from the main street, we would have found banh mi for even cheaper. Check out our following video showing the Vietnamese sub creations:
Twitter