Banh Mi cart on St. Marks Place/2nd Avenue

When I was walking home with my fiancé Patrick last night, I happened upon a new banh mi cart on St. Marks and 2nd Avenue. Banh mi is a Vietnamese sandwich prepared on a soft baguette with a hard outer crust. Each sandwich came with one meat–either Vietnamese meatball, chicken, roasted eel, tuna, beef or pork– and sweet pickled carrots and cucumber, cilantro and optional jalapeños for an added kick.
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If the busy storefront windows at Sahadi’s, on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, don’t appeal to your minimalist leanings, just get over it. You’re going to love this place, even if it takes you years to try all the products. The narrow aisles form a sort of labyrinth through the cramped space, where at every turn you’ll discover bins and jars of dried fruits and nuts or refrigerator cases full of cheeses. This is the place to buy anything you could ever want to eat from the Middle East, along with a healthy dose of European specialty goods.

When I asked the man in charge of the olive bar how many varieties he sold, he did some quick mental math and came up with an estimate.

“Thirty-four?” he said as he scooped a heap of shriveled, oily, black, Moroccan olives into a plastic container. more…