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Eye on Business: Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery in Fairmount


  Vietnamese cuisine has come into fashion in Philadelphia over the last few years. Pho and banh mi restaurants have been popping up in neighborhoods across the city and the existing ones have been getting much busier. In a way, the sheer amount of banh mi restaurants opening is precisely the reason Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery owner Erik Cha felt the need to open one of his own.

  “I was just so tired of seeing banh mi and coffee places so commercialized. I just wanted a good bành mi sandwich, nothing special,” Cha said. “I didn’t want, I don’t know, five fish bành mi, you have like filet mignon bành mi, kobe beef bành mi — I mean, I just wanted a traditional, Vietnamese way of getting it done, making it right.”

Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery

Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery/Sean Kearney

  Cha, who grew up in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Olney, found his way in the restaurant business during his first year at Temple University. Cha began taking jobs in small sushi restaurants before quickly moving into fine dining. “I worked at Rittenhouse Square Hotel, little bit at the Ritz Carlton,” Cha said.

  It was around this time that Cha started working for Phillipe Chin, who was the youngest chef on record to be inducted into Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, a society of chefs who uphold the traditions and standards of French culinary art. Cha himself was the youngest maître d’ in Philadelphia at the age of 20 at the time while he learned under Chin at Phillipe on Locust.

  While Cha knew food, he wanted to buck the trend of over complicating the traditional Vietnamese sandwich. “I really just felt like everyone was trying to do so much, man,” Cha said. “I just felt like they were losing touch of the foundations of the original recipes.”

  Cha, in the interest of steering the trend in bành mi creation to its roots, consulted a cook’s opinion he respected very much. “[I went to] my mother-in-law,” Cha said, laughing. “I said to her, ‘hey ma, if you were to turn back the clock 20 years, how were these meats marinated? How’s this supposed to taste?’ She said, ‘well, I’ll show you.’ So the recipes for the meats and marinades, except for the Korean barbecue, are all her ideas.”

Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery

Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery/Sean Kearney

  Cha’s mother-in-law took the process of making a traditional bành mi very seriously, even teaching the methods in which to hand cut the meats used for each sandwich. “Even if you were to turn back to pre-war, pre Vietnam war, Vietnam did not have machines to slice the meats. Even if it was paper thin, it was hand cut. And she basically said, ‘I want you to do the same. Make all your meat hand-cut.’ So in the middle the night, there we would be with two huge meat cleavers just dicing away.”

  While using tried-and-true traditional recipes for bành mi is of the utmost concern to Cha, recreating the Vietnamese coffee experience is just as important. “Coffee and bành mi always go together. It’s a love affair not many people understand,” Cha said.

  Vietnam’s economy has long been tethered to its coffee production since the French introduced it in the mid-19th century. While many might think of Brazil, Ethiopia, and Central America as the biggest producers of coffee, Vietnam’s coffee production was second in the world only to Brazil and exported 1.29 million tons of Robusta coffee beans in 2012. “I would bet about 70 percent of the Robusta beans coffee drinkers [use] come from Vietnam,” Cha said.

  While Vietnamese iced coffee traditionally uses Vietnamese Robusta, Brown Street Coffee uses Café du Monde, the famous New Orleans coffee maker, for their brews. The chicory root used in some of Café du Monde’s roasts results in a flavor profile very similar to that of Vietnamese Robusta.

Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery

Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery/Sean Kearney

  But when it comes to his espresso and drip coffee, Cha sought out small roasters who had an attention to detail. Cha eventually went with Toby’s Estate, a roaster based out of Brooklyn who he felt shared his passion for coffee. “They just want to talk about coffee,” Cha said. “They want to tell you of their trip to Africa when one of their buyers actually had to climb a mountain to talk to a farmer [who’s farm is] like a thousand feet above sea level. That’s what it’s supposed to be. I was like, forget everybody else. Sign me up.”

  You can check out Brown Street Coffee and Bànhery at 2545 Brown Street Monday- Friday, 7AM-6PM, or Saturday-Sunday, 7AM-5PM.

  “With recipes from my mother-in-law and coffee from Toby’s Estate I thought, ‘this just can’t go wrong!’” Cha said, “I’m blessed. The locals are phenomenal. I just think everyone’s been ready to take us in.”

  And while Cha’s processes regarding bành mi and coffee are meticulous, it all comes back to a philosophy of simplicity over complication, “When people just come in to get a cup of coffee and people watch—man I love that. I just want to go back to what a coffee shop is supposed to be,” Cha pauses before saying, “well, and you know, with bành mi,” and laughs.

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