Banh Mi Fever Hits Town

Saturday mornings at nine on the dot, chef Greg Martell has a routine in Wooster Square.

Warming up the equipment in his food truck, he surveys the produce at the CitySeed Farmers’ Market. He takes a quick inventory to ensure ingredients are in place for four hours of cooking.

Then, even though he usually hears a shout of ​“We’re not quite ready!” from someone on his tiny staff, he slides open the window of what was once a Caseus Cheese Truck and begins to greet regulars who are queueing up outside.

But Martell isn’t selling grilled cheese. And the truck doesn’t look as it did in its gruyere-scented past life. With his wife Erica and son Brody, Martell is the force behind Chief Brody’s Banh Mi, a relatively new bánh mì food truck that rolls into New Haven on select Wednesdays and Saturdays for the CitySeed Farmers Markets downtown and in Wooster Square.

Like scientist-turned-chef Duc Nguyen and Kam Tom at Three Sheets, Martell is helping lead a bánh mì revolution in New Haven. 

The idea has been long in the making. When Bronx-born Martell first came across bánh mì in 2002 in New York City, he knew nothing of the sandwich, the humble origins of which go back to 19th-century French colonial rule in Vietnam. He had no idea that its now-happy marriage of yeasty, just-crisp baguette, braised, mashed, and fluffed pork, pickled carrot and daikon, mayonnaise, and cilantro was the product of turf wars that the French had waged from the 1850s onward, claiming Vietnam as part of French Indochina from 1887 to 1954. And surely, he had no sense that even the name of the sandwich, rumored to be from the French pain de mie, would cause whole Reddit forums of linguistic sensitivities. 

Nope. Leaving work at the Grotto Monterone at 4 a.m. one day in 2002, Martell knew only that he was hungry. His walk from Forsyth Street to his apartment near Ground Zero was going to be hard to get through on an empty stomach. At the intersection of Forsyth and Canal streets, there was a little old lady with a bánh mì truck, setting up as the fish market workers were starting their shifts and he was leaving his. 

“It was so good,” Martell recalled of his first bánh mì on a recent episode of WNHH’s ​“Kitchen Sync.” ​“It was pickly, it was spicy, mayonnaisey, and braised, crispy bread, and I just remember it traveling really well to eat while walking … I didn’t know [about its origin] until I started researching and asking around about it, and then it made perfect sense to me. And it just became this beautiful thing.”

Committing the flavor profile to memory, Martell quickly became obsessed. ​“I always wanted to start a business that was around one thing, one whole ingredient that we’d build everything else around,” he explained. ​“I could never quite find that one thing. And when I started going across my history … I always drew right back to the bánh mì.”

Getting the operation off the ground, however, was plagued with stops and starts. After bidding on the truck of his dreams ​“in the middle of New Jersey, like, deep Jersey” in 2009, Martell ​“was crushed” to find out that another bidder had snatched it out from under him.

Hired as a chef at Caseus Fromagerie & Bistro a month later — ​“I had to find work,” he was quick to say in the interview — he was doubly dismayed to find that the other bidder had been his new boss, Jason Sobocinski.

But he and Sobocinski became fast friends. His business networks tightened and prospects started to look up. From Caseus, he joined the front of house for the Barcelona Restaurant Group and worked with them for four years, nose to the grindstone with the dream of getting back to a bánh mì truck filed with his own, heavily pickled concoctions. 

Once he was entrenched in New Haven’s culinary community, it didn’t take long for the gastronomic universe to throw him a bone. Around 2014, Sobocinski offered him the old truck at market price from 2009. And in six months, Chief Brody’s was well on its way to being what Martell had imagined, after days and nights spent beta-testing baguettes, vegan sausage, and his late mother’s chopped beef liver.

“The things I know now about running a business that works on all levels … I probably wouldn’t have had the same skill set back then that I have now to do it the right way,” he said. ​“As far as being immersed in the community, we’re on wheels. I know a lot of people who don’t like to move around in their truck — we’re all over the place.”

The Brick-And-Mortar Side Of Things

While Martell hands out sandwich after sandwich from the truck window, Duc Nguyen (previously featured on WNHH’s ​“Open For Business”) goes a more traditional route at his Orange Street storefront, happy for the same brick-and-mortar security Martell doesn’t want at this point in his career. For Nguyen, who immigrated from Saigon with his parents when he was 9, making bánh mì isn’t a novelty so much as a way to connect with home — and recreate a bit of it in the Elm City.

“It all started with my obsession with street food,” he said in an interview for the same episode of ​“Kitchen Sync.” ​“It brings back memories since I was a little kid, going to school in Vietnam …

That changed when his family was forced to leave Saigon. They migrated as refugees to Auburn Hills, Michigan. It was cold, and the family was ​“so isolated from any Vietnamese populations” when they arrived. They made weekly pilgrimages to Detroit’s single Asian grocery store to try to find familiar ingredients. From that moment in the 1970s until he moved to New York for his graduate studies — and despite a growing affinity to American foods like peanut butter — he fantasized about a place where he could bring the Vietnamese street food of his youth back to life.

“I wanted to keep the menu very simple, and there had to be a few options that I could play around with to reduce all those ideas [I had] down to a few, a handful of items,” he said.

While his and Martell’s paths have literally overlapped — both spent a considerable amount of time in New York’s Chinatown district in the early 2000s, and Nguyen still shops there for ingredients and new sandwich ideas — the two have dropped on New Haven two very different products. Though they agree that the bread is probably the most important part of the sandwich to get right.

From Chief Brody’s, one can expect a pickly, cilantro-packed demi-baguette with aioli, pate, and protein that Martell would want even the 

filmic namesake of the truck to be attracted to. Nguyen has stuck with more traditional types of bánh mì, offering Hanoi-style grilled fish, traditional tofu, pork, and rice noodles alongside Vietnamese drinks and sides, and new breakfast dishes like meat-stuffed puff pastry (pâté chaud) and savory rice porridge (chao ga). 

That diversity means New Haveners no longer have to wait for Three Sheets to open for a concert or evening to get their bánh mì fix. It’s also why, both Nguyen and Martell said, they aren’t feeling a ton of competition with each other. For now.

To listen to the accompanying episode of ​“Kitchen Sync,” click on or download the audio above, or check out the ​“WNHH Arts Mix” podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes.