Last Saturday, unaware of my impending doom, I went for an aimless bike ride and found myself in Saint Paul, kind of not the ideal for a cyclist. Saint Paul isn't Pittsburgh or San Francisco but still, if I lived east of the river, I never would have gotten back into bicycling.
The further I biked into Saint Paul, I found myself in the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood (making this our first Saint Anthony Park entry out of the seemingly half dozen thousand Saint Anthonies we've been to), eventually finding myself passing the Hampden Park Co-Op or, as it's marked on the wall outside, Hampden Park Market & Deli.
And I thought, "Deli, huh?" and turned my bike around and locked up out front - and here's the thing about co-ops: they always have plenty of bike parking available - and I went inside and looked for the deli and, well, it was a - What do they call those things? A hot bar? A soup bar? You know what I'm talking about, the island with the covered tins of soup under sneeze guards, where you ladle your soup into a compostable cup. Let me look this up.
[googles]
OK, yeah, it's a hot bar. And I think to myself, "This is the - I don't want soup," because it's fucking August, and then I see that their deli also includes a shelf of pre-wrapped sandwiches and I look those over and I see this little beaut: A mock duck banh mi.
I pick it up, take it over to the register, the lady asks me if I found everything I was looking for today, I say yes, she clocks that I'm out on a bike ride and tells me to enjoy my lunch. I thank her and walk across the street to the actual Hampden Park and unwrap my sandwich and bite in and -
"Come on, dude! Is it really that hard to not fuck up mock duck!?" was the first thing that ran through my head. See how soy sauce is the third-listed ingredient after the mock duck? (BTW, for those who never knew this, ingredients in this are listed from highest amount to lowest amount.) Yeah, that's not a mistake. The mock duck is soo-wimmin' in soy sauce. It was... punchy at first, and took a moment - OK, a couple moments to get used to. You know, like getting your ears attuned to the sound of old Arrow Video footage of Black Flag or Samhain. Like it sounds like shit at first but by the ten minute mark, you're just used to it. That was this sandwich. At first, that soy sauce is the only thing you can see, like on a Lovecraftian level of cosmic psychosis, but after the fourth bite, you're like, "Meh."
And, then after that point, you can enjoy the pickled veggies, which extend beyond the pickled carrot & daikon to include pickling the cucumbers and adding pickled onion. They've basically zhoozhed up the classical banh mi construction. And this would work if it weren't for the soy sauce overload.
I'm trying to be generous with this one because it's a cool shop staffed with friendly people and I'm not mad about the almost six dollars for this. I think that's a fair price for a sandwich this size with no sides. But, um, I can't really accurately do this one, I'm sure you can tell because all I've done so far is talk about the damned soy sauce, because Kath and I split up the night after this - no, you don't get to know why, this is a sandwich blog - and I basically turned into Cameron from the beginning of Ferris Beuller's Day Off for a week.
Just without the pills or the good looks.
So, you'll forgive me if I remember squat about the bread or the texture of the mock duck, I'm sure. I will tell you to give this place your money, should you find yourself east of the river. You don't have to get the mock duck banh mi. They've got non-vegan things there, too. Like I think I passed on a turkey and cheese or something.
And I'm sure you'll forgive me if I call this it for season ten. I mean at least until Burger King or Wendy's puts out spooky-themed burgers or something in October. I'll probably have something to say about those.
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