The Spot: How Ba Le keeps banh mi real

We always hear about the shiny, new food companies. The Spot is a series about the Philadelphia area's more established establishments and the people behind them.

In the 1950s, a young man named Le Vo left his family's home in the Vietnamese countryside and set up a lunch cart in Saigon.

He began training with a French chef, who taught him how to bake baguettes as light and flaky as any in Paris. He stuffed them with meats, fresh herbs and pickled vegetables, and started selling the sandwiches as banh mi.

They were a hit, and by 1965, Vo was running dozens of carts around the region under the brand "Ba Le." As war encroached, maintaining a business became untenable, and in 1972, Vo and wife Lan Nguyen gathered their children and departed for the United States.

The family settled in San Jose, and in 1982, opened a Ba Le sandwich shop there. It was met with the same success as the Vietnam original.

In 1988, Vo helped a daughter open a second Ba Le in Chicago, kicking off another round of expansion. Over the next decade, he traveled across the country helping both friends and relatives open banh mi shops. In the late 1990s, he came to Philadelphia to launch an outpost with another daughter, Thi Nguyen.

For a location, they chose a former warehouse on Washington Avenue. Set midway between Sixth and Seventh Streets, it was the anchor building in what was then an empty lot, but would soon become the third Asian strip mall on the South Philly thoroughfare.

On Oct.1, 1998, Thi Nguyen opened the doors to Ba Le Bakery. Three months later, Nguyen met her future husband, Harry Tran.

Tran was a fellow Saigon native who had made it out less than a week before the North Vietnamese army invaded. He began helping with the shop at night, running the front of the house while Thi oversaw the kitchen.

After two years, Tran left his day job, and the couple poured everything they had into making Ba Le work. After flirting with the idea of table service - and even opening and then closing a separate pho restaurant at the back of the building - Tran and Thi embraced the takeaway model.

They added other Vietnamese foods to their selection of made-to-order sandwiches on house-baked bread, including a house-ground pork sausage roll that's gone on to become their biggest seller.

The shop became a must-visit stop for Vietnamese expats traveling the Northeast Corridor, as well as a go-to spot for the growing local community.

And at the end of the '00s, when banh mi crept into mainstream American consciousness, Ba Le began to attract a regular non-Asian clientele as well.

Three years ago, Thi's son Victor Nguyen, 29, came on board and began training to eventually take over the business.

Sitting in the office built into the middle of the huge Ba Le kitchen, he and Tran, 52, talked about what makes a banh mi authentic, why so many chefs around Philadelphia use their bread, and what led to the shop's busiest week ever.

What does "Ba Le" mean?

It's a nickname, really. Victor's grandfather, Vo Le, was the second born child, so "ba" is his rank. The literal translation of "ba" is "three" - in Vietnam, the the first born is known as number two and the second is number three in the family.

So "Ba Le" means "second born Le."

Are you affiliated with the other Ba Le shops around the country?

Not officially; they are all separate companies. But Vo Le's dream was for each kid to have their own store, so many of them are run by Victor's aunts and uncles. Two in Virginia, two in Chicago and one in Alhambra, Calif., are owned by close relatives.

How did you get involved in the shop, Harry?

I started working with my wife before we even got married, right after she opened. I had another job too, doing consulting for banks trying to deal with the Y2K bug. I did both for around two years, working something like 100 hours a week.

One morning, I woke up at my desk. I looked around and realized I had no idea how I'd gotten there. It was all the way in Delaware - I had a 40-minute commute!

It was a little scary. It's like when people black out from too much drinking, but it was just exhaustion. So I said, that's it. The next day, I told my boss I was done.

Any regrets about leaving the financial sector for the restaurant biz?

Not at all. To not have to get up in the morning and put on a suit and tie, that's the best thing in the world. I have not worn a tie since I left. Ever. Not even to weddings. Instead, I get to make bread. I love bread. I spent a lot of time working on it here, and around five or six years ago, we hit on the optimum recipe.

What makes a banh mi, a banh mi?

Well, banh mi means bread, that's the literal translation. Inside the bread, you can have all different proteins, but the vegetables are always the same: pickled daikon and carrots, cilantro, cucumber and raw jalapeno peppers. That's consistent throughout, traditionally, and so are the spreads: mayonnaise and pork liver pate (we make them both in-house).

Although lot of other places are experimenting with different spreads now. Fusion spreads.

When did the "fusion" banh mi start to pop up? Does the trend annoy or please you?

That started around 2008 or 2009, and just kept growing. For us, the general awareness of banh mi is an exciting thing. I appreciate the things they do, and the different tastes and flavors. But here, we will stay authentic as much as possible. Other places can fusionize it and cater to different audiences, which is great, but what makes us successful is that we are authentic. We actually go to Asia every year and study the market and trends. We don't just add a new item; we really research it so it has authentic taste. Some things, you can go to the supermarket and get, but if you get it here, you know it's fresh.

Are ingredients hard to find?

Sometimes. Victor does a good job of finding sources. First you translate the ingredient into English, for a better search query, then look it up and try to find vendors in the U.S. Occasionally we have sourced things from Vietnam, but it's difficult getting them through customs. So we get many things from California. It's still not easy, because a lot of the places don't have websites.

You also do not have a website.

No. We've never done advertising. It's all just word of mouth. We have a Facebook page, but we only post to it like twice a year.

A lot of chefs around town buy your baguettes to use in their own restaurants. How did they hear about you?

I don't know! They just started showing up. First was probably Oyster House. Then Michael Schulson, who has Sampan, and now also Double Knot, which he just opened. All of a sudden his bread order went from being once a week to every other day. There are more chefs now than we can count, and they're not all doing banh mi. At Wursthaus Schmitz in the Reading Terminal Market, they put German sausage on our rolls. Chef Jeremy Nolen, he came in one day and said, "I went all over town and this is the best bread." I was like, "Really?"

What's your busiest time of year?

The Chinese New Year, which is also the Vietnamese New Year. This year it was the week before the Super Bowl, and we broke an all-time sales record. It's almost like Thanksgiving for Asian communities - sons and daughters travel to visit their parents, and everyone eats a lot and gives people gifts of food. Since we're in the main corridor of travel on the East Coast, people stop at our store if they're driving by Philadelphia. We have a lot of regular customers from places like Fairfax County, Va., and Syracuse, N.Y. Actual Thanksgiving is also busy. One year we decided to close, because we thought, everyone's going to eat turkey, no one will come here. When we came in the next day, the door was completely covered with notes of customers who had wanted to stop in. Some of them were nice, and some of them were not so nice. So now we stay open.

Your low prices must help attract the crowds.

When we first opened, the banh mi were just $2. Now they are $4.95 - and if you buy five, you get one free. You can buy two of our sandwiches for the price of one cheesesteak. And they're a lot healthier, too.

Do you have a timeframe for handing over the shop to the next generation, Harry?

Victor has taken on most of the responsibilities already. He started three years ago, and we talked about a 10-year training program before we turned everything over to him. So that he knows every inch of this place, what makes it tick. Also, I wouldn't know what to do if I retired. There's only so much golf I could play or music I could listen to. I enjoy working, I enjoy coming here. I love seeing the customers. That's my favorite thing.

Ba Le Bakery 606 Washington Ave., 215-389-4350 Hours: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily