#84 – SAUSAGE BANH MI at ÉPICERIE BOULUD

For the third year in a row, I’m going to attempt to eat every single item on Time Out New York’s annual 100 Best Dishes list. In no particular order, here’s my take on their Top 100. Let the gluttony continue…

With apologies to Lincoln Center across the street, I think we should call the corner of Broadway and West 64th Street Boulud Center. You can find a Disney World-like cluster of Daniel Boulud owned restaurants there. It’s even difficult to tell where one eating establishment ends and where the other begins.

An outdoor barrier separates the seating at Bar Boulud and the one at Épicerie Boulud, while the fancy Boulud Sud is conveniently located around the corner. And I’m sure there must be some secret passage between the three.

Wearing my usual T-shirt and shorts, I really only fit in at Épicerie, the casual (but not cheap) grocery and prepared food center. Here they hawk a variety of overpriced, fancy French products ($20 for jam??) alongside hot sandwiches, cold salads, and a generous helping of charcuterie options.

The ordering system here is set-up for failure. Salads are at one line and tapas and hot sandwiches are at the other end. You pay for everything at one cash register whenever you feel like it. If I didn’t have a reputation to uphold, I could have easily eaten my sausage and slipped out without anybody being the wiser.

But I paid for all my food (a little too much if you ask me), including a rocket arugula salad with meaty hunks of  Iberico ham and buttery marcona almonds, a sweet Clementine Confit, and the Time Out list item.

TONY name checked Boulud’s Bánh Mi sandwich. The crusty Vietnamese sandwich has shown up all over NYC and so to stand-out from the cheap Chinatown dives, this has to be something special. And sadly, it was a disappointment.

The ingredients sound promising with a whole lot of meat: homemade Thai sausage, country paté, and Parisian ham. Then, the sausage is topped with a pickled radish and carrot slaw, jalapeño mayo and fresh herbs like mint and cilantro.

Unfortunately, most of the flavors got muddied together. The bun was large and the sausage small so I could barely taste the sausage. The jalapeño mayo had some kick to it and I loved the crisp vegetables, but the meat flavors surprisingly took a back seat. And the green herbs were wilted and brown in certain spots – not what I expect from a high-end $9.50 hot dog.

Perhaps we came on an off-night, but truthfully there should never be an off-night at one of these three restaurants. That’s like going to Disney World and saying the animatronic rides had a bad day.

Would Épicerie Boulud’s Sausage Banh Mi make my Top 100 of the year? It gets a 6 out of 10 for lack of flavor and lesser quality ingredients than expected.