Lily Bakery’s inexpensive Vietnamese eats

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

When a foreign food assimilates its way into the national diet, it tends to devolve, its culinary cachet degraded until it becomes an oversimplified version of itself. It happened with the taco (sprinkled with shredded lettuce and cheddar cheese until it became unrecognizable), and it happened with teriyaki (a tradition turned as sickly sweet as the sauces slathered on baby-back ribs). Now, that same regression is besieging banh mi.

The famous Vietnamese sandwich has long been a cheap-eats staple: a crisp, buttery baguette fully loaded for around $2. It’s dominated Little Saigon and our own Cambodia Town forever. But now that the sandwich finally stormed New York City and earned a spot on Virgin America’s in-flight menu, banh mi is enduring an explosion of popularity that threatens to dull it down to the point of banality.

Luckily, we have Lily Bakery to uphold quality banh mi.

As with so many of the Vietnamese restaurants and shops that inhabit Cambodia Town, Lily displays a cross-culturalism that’s equal parts Vietnamese and Cambodian. It’s fitting, then, that Lily itself is a hybrid place, as much a restaurant as it is a market where Cheetos and shrimp chips hang alongside shrink-wrapped Vietnamese sweets and snacks. Yet even though the restaurant is shoehorned into a small space, Lily’s food isn’t inhibited.

The bakery’s chief export is its banh mi. You won’t need any extra enticement to order a sandwich, but Lily certainly influences you by keeping its fresh baguettes on the counter to be split and stuffed at your command. Here, that means a sandwich of either barbecued pork or chicken, cucumber, cilantro, quick-pickled carrots and daikon and rings of jalapeño. As is often the case, the barbecued pork makes a superior sandwich, its sweet char sui-style glaze in perfect balance with the carrots’ and daikon’s vinegar-shocked crunch and the jalapeño’s occasionally bracing heat.

Should you be able to convince the staff to construct it, you might also be able to order a sandwich filled with nem nuong, a grilled pork patty that lends a bit of juiciness to the banh mi. But don’t count on finding it at just any hour—Lily often runs out of nem nuong. Even so, the barbecued chicken and pork varieties are plenty good, and at $2.50 apiece they’re well worth a bulk order.

Lily’s specialty is clear, but the restaurant doesn’t limit itself to banh mi alone. Banh xeo makes what might be a surprising appearance, a rice-flour crepe packed with pork, shrimp and bean sprouts designed to be torn apart and eaten with a batch of herbs (basil, mint and the like) and dipped in nuoc cham. Bowls of bun, the vermicelli noodle salad scattered with fresh herbs and vegetables, is also available.

With only two tables to accommodate those who want their food then and there, Lily relies rather heavily on its take-out business. As a result, the restaurant always keeps a couple buffet trays overflowing with glassy noodles, fresh salads and pork roasted and lacquered to a glistening mahogany. Bolstering those quick options is a table covered with both sweet and savory bites, things like grapefruit-sized steamed buns formed around sweet centers of meat.

Lily’s kitchen isn’t as exacting as those down in Little Saigon, but the restaurant’s quality isn’t in question. The place is as consistent as they come, a solid neighborhood eatery where the only variable seems to be whether you want to wash your meal down with an iced coffee, a can of coconut juice or a durian shake.

Still hungry? Visit Miles for more at eatfoodwith.me.

LILY BAKERY 1171 E ANAHEIM ST • LONG BEACH 90813 • 562.218.7818 • OPEN DAILY • FOOD FOR TWO $5-15

Tags: banh mi, banh xeo, cambodia town, Food, lily bakery, Long Beach, vietnamese