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2016-10-12
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Beef Bourguignon Banh MiBeef Bourguignon - Beef Short Rib / Rib, bacon, bouquet garni, onions, olive oil, Burgundy wine,oyster sauceBanh Mi – Chicken Liver Pate, baguette, pickled carrots, cucumber, chilli,cilantroHK$120After my failed first attempt to join The Ultimate Sandwich competition, I made a second go at Mrs. Pound. This time, I called ahead, and the person answering the phone assured me that they were indeed serving the beef bourguignon banh mi, even though it was Saturday and they hav
Rules: I just made up these rules, but I abided by them throughout the contest. Rule #1: Only one sandwich can be crowned The Ultimate Sandwich, and it must be one of the eight entrants. While Crave magazine is giving the award based on sales, my award is completely subjective, based on my own opinion. Rule #2: I must eat the sandwich exactly the way the restaurant serves it, with no additions or subtractions (unless they’re explicitly offered as a choice point): no sauces from the table, no salt, no pepper, nothing. Rule #3: Only The Ultimate Sandwich deserves a smiley-face review. If a restaurant pretends it has The Ultimate Sandwich, but then just has a regular old sandwich, then that restaurant is ipso facto only OK at best, and perhaps frowny-face at worst.]
Beef Bourguignon Banh Mi
Beef Bourguignon - Beef Short Rib / Rib, bacon, bouquet garni, onions, olive oil, Burgundy wine,
oyster sauce
Banh Mi – Chicken Liver Pate, baguette, pickled carrots, cucumber, chilli,
cilantro
HK$120
After my failed first attempt to join The Ultimate Sandwich competition, I made a second go at Mrs. Pound. This time, I called ahead, and the person answering the phone assured me that they were indeed serving the beef bourguignon banh mi, even though it was Saturday and they have a special weekend brunch menu.
When I arrived, as you can see, the sandwich was clearly listed on the specials menu, and I ordered it, as well as a lychee spritzer. Let’s get right to the sandwich.
First off, there were a few seeming discrepancies between the sandwich description on Crave magazine’s website and the sandwich I got. As you can see from the pictures, there doesn’t appear to be any chicken liver pate spread on the bread, and I certainly didn’t taste or otherwise notice any. Second, there wasn’t any chilli, and the cilantro was mostly cilantro stems and not cilantro leaves. Definite loss of points there. Additionally, I believe it was not just pickled carrots, but also pickled daikon, which is better. I could be mistaken, but it certainly seemed and looked like daikon. Perhaps next time I shall have the server explain the sandwich to me.
(I should be clear that Crave magazine represented this as the sandwich ingredients, but nothing at Mrs. Pound said anything about the sandwich other than “Bourguignon Banh Mi - $120.”)
The beef was reasonably soft and tender but still with a good meatiness, and a nice overall flavor. Muscle is connected to the ribs by a chewy thingy (sorry, I’m not an anatomist) and I got some chewy bits that weren’t terribly unpleasant, but wouldn’t have shown up in a more traditional stewing cut. My pictures are (alas) a little misleading, in that they make it seem like there’s more beef than there really is. I’m not complaining that there is too little food, but trying to paint a realistic picture of the sandwich: the stew laid out at the top of the picture is pretty much all that’s in there. I do wish there was more beef, and I wish there was more sauce, because frankly, beef bourguignon is delicious, and putting it on a crusty baguette as a sandwich is a great idea. But my bread was mostly just dry baguette, not soggy-with-stew baguette, and that was a little disappointing, given the promise. I didn’t notice any onion, and the oyster sauce was also beyond the refinement of my palate to detect.The pickled vegetables were plentiful, which is good, and on the sweet side. A bit sweeter than I’d like, perhaps, but fine. The shredded cucumber was a nice touch, but there wasn’t much of it. The cilantro stems were annoying. The sandwich was a bit dry: as I said, there wasn’t much sauce from the stew, no pate that I could see, no mayo, and no Sriracha. And, I’m pretty sure Sriracha would have worked, and that’s because the sandwich wasn’t really as much a marriage of two things, as a juxtaposition of them. The beef bourguignon sat on one side, and crusty bread and stew works great together, and the other fixings mainly got squeezed to the other side, and were sort of like a vegetable banh mi, without any of the Vietnamese pork and pate. It struck me as more lazy fusion than actually a genius combination of two existing dishes.
So was this The Ultimate Sandwich? I’m afraid not, though it squeaks into the top half at #4. I like the stew on a sandwich idea, but this particular stew on a banh mi didn’t work for me. Additionally, the banh mi elements were a little weak. The carrots, daikon, and cucumber were spot-on, but the missing pate, lack of sauce, lack of spice, and bizarre decision to not pick the leaves off the cilantro before throwing them on suggested to me that whoever was making this sandwich wasn’t actually trying to make The Ultimate Sandwich, and was perhaps phoning Saturday in a little.
(Highly Unofficial) Ultimate Sandwich Competition Results:
1. ***WINNER*** Bulgogi Roast Beef Sandwich – Jinjuu
2. Steak in Knead – Knead
3. Ultimate Smoked Pastrami & Cheese – Morty’s Delicatessen
4. Beef Bourguignon Banh Mi - Mrs. Pound
5. The Gentleman’s Sandwich – Beef & Liberty
6. Shanghai Dip – Second Draft
7. [Did not show] – Posto Pubblico
8. HA HA Piss Off! – Bread & Beast
张贴
