Bicycle fuelled food cart to hit Moncton streets

06/03/2015

KAYLA BYRNE Times & Transcript

June 1, 2015

Ivy Lam is taking her affection for Vietnamese sandwiches to the streets of Moncton. Starting in June she’ll be pedalling around her very own food cart called Bánh Mignon.

Photo: Kayla Byrne/ Times & Transcript

It won’t be too long before a pint-sized bicycle powered food cart will be pedalling around the streets of Moncton.

Instead of serving up a big dish of greasy hot dogs, burgers and fries, this mobile food vendor will be doing things a little differently. Bánh Mignon will be the city’s first exclusively Vietnamese sandwich (Bánh mì) source.

“A big part of this for me is the cultural connection with food and people,” Bánh Mignon’s creator Ivy Lam said. “This is just something Moncton doesn’t have right now.

“There’s a lot of food here, but I always think there could just be more going on in our food world.”

Having grown up in a Vietnamese family in Mississauga, Ontario, Lam says Bánh mìs were practically an everyday thing for her as a kid. And while she’s been in Moncton for a few years, she says there are many days where all she wants is one of her mom’s homemade meatball sandwiches.

“As kids we used to go to a nearby store all the time and pick up like 10 of these sandwiches,” she said. “We had them for everything.”

While she was dreaming of her childhood snack, she thought she couldn’t be the only one in Moncton lusting after the crispy, flaky taste of a good Vietnamese sandwich. And just as simple as that, the idea for the Bánh Mignon food cart was born.

The cart’s name was inspired by both her family’s culture and her new found Acadian culture- pairing the Vietnamese word for sandwich with the French word for cute.

“I’ve wanted to open something for a really long time and I had played around with different ideas for a while, but then after I thought about this more and more I knew it was what I wanted to do,” Lam said. “These sandwiches are so simple, but also complex and elegant.”

Much like what one might expect from a sandwich, Bánh mìs can be topped with a variety of things including grilled chicken, fried egg and deli meat. But Lam says what makes Bánh mìs stand out is the sandwich’s unique bread and Vietnamese spices.

“The bread is crispy, but at the same time it’s lighter than the lightest sponge cake; it’s flakier than the most flakey pastry,” Lam said. “All together the sandwich is sweet, spicy, salty and sour.”

One way to make these sandwiches her own was to make everything by hand and use only local products. Once the cart gets on the road, Lam says she’ll be whipping up all sorts of homemade mayonnaise, bread and pâté.

“Even though I’m making Vietnamese sandwiches which isn’t a local dish, all the elements are local,” Lam said. “When I go travelling one of the first things I want to do is try the amazing local food, but I feel like that’s something we don’t do around here.”

When it came time for Lam to bring her cart idea to fruition, along with keeping it local, she wanted something that would not only be small, but also sustainable and Eco-friendly. With the help of a few friends she rounded up some salvaged wood and other random scraps to build her very own food cart which she will tow around by bicycle.

“I made most of the cart by myself, and it’s not fancy by any means but I’m really proud of it,” Lam said.

While the cart still needs some finishing touches before it hits the road this June, Lam says it will be totally powered by a battery pack. In time, the crafty sandwich creator will also be installing solar panels.

“When I first started thinking about this I knew right away that I didn’t want a food truck ,” Lam said “I love road tripping, but I hate driving- sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to me. “I think it’s time that people start looking at alternative methods of transportation.”

Lam hasn’t finalized all of her stops yet, but says she’s looking at the downtown area. She has also signed up to be a part of the city’s food vendor pilot project- an initiative to bring more food choices downtown.

Unlike most businesses, Lam says her goal is to keep this a small thing as she will be the cart’s sole employee.