Feeding it forward at Junction shop
I get fed a lot.
As a welcome change, Baguette & Co. lets me feed others.
For $3.75 last week, I bought a meal token for anyone to use at the Junction sandwich shop. This covers half the cost of a tasty sandwich or filling salad; the restaurant donates the rest. It felt so right that I bought a second token. (No, I didn’t expense them.)
Baguette & Co.’s “feed it foward” initiative is a generous and loving response to hunger and food insecurity. Every day, six or seven customers buy tokens. This is in addition to the 50 or 100 tokens some families buy in bulk.
“We’re not heroes. It’s completely community driven,” says Lynn Kwon, who owns Baguette with husband, Yong Kwon.
The Kwons opened their socially conscious business last September after relocating from elsewhere in the Junction. To integrate Baguette into the community, all the design and construction resources came from within a kilometre radius. The result is a chicly minimalist space with exposed brick walls and 16 seats, all salvaged and repainted.
We’ll get to the food in a second. First, it’s important to hear what Kwon says about helping others: “There is dignity in this.” Agreed. Whoever needs a meal gets one: no questions, no judgments. That might be someone on social assistance or a sex worker plying her trade on the street outside, Kwon says.
For donors, it’s a viable alternative to taking items to a food bank or donating cash on the street.
Of course, there’s little profit in this. The Kwons simply aim to break even. Both grew up in immigrant families — South Korean for Yong Kwon, Vietnamese refugees from Thailand for Lynn Kwon — who credit luck as part of their success.
“We have a moral responsibility to give back,” says Lynn Kwon, a former project manager for corporate food services. Now, about the food. Let’s start with the namesake baguettes.
Rice flour in the custombaked loaves creates two interesting differences. The first is a crust that shatters into a cascade of golden crumbs with every bite. The second is an airy interior that nonetheless stands up to the mayonnaise and other fine spreads made in house.
The menu is small: five sandwiches, three salads, a daily soup.
Harvest grain salad ($7.50) has ingredients that taste good and are good for you: quinoa, sweet potato, almonds, sunflower seeds, cranberries and avocado. Market salad ($7.50) is less impressive, mainly greens relieved by chopped beet and avocado. Diners add their choice of protein, such as sweet beef bulgogi, Vietnamese grilled chicken or tofu.
There are options for dressings, too. The lime comes through like a freight train in the citrus-lime dressing. The Asian sesame house dressing presses the right buttons.
Lynn Kwon, a self-taught cook, roasts French-style herbed chicken for a delicious club sandwich ($7.50) anointed with lemon aioli.
The French dip ($7.50), a classic American sandwich with no connection to France, starts as sirloin roasted with onions for seven hours.
The resulting pan juices become an intensely flavoured jus poured into a bowl for dipping the sandwich. The beef is sliced and layered with sautéed mushrooms, caramelized onions and provolone. If you can resist drinking the jus, you’re better than me.
Pickled banana peppers overpower the southern sandwich ($7.50) made with fried whitefish. But I can totally get behind the banh mi ($7.50).
The Kwons ate a lot of Vietnam’s famed sandwich as research. They aimed to build a premium version by omitting the traditional cold cuts or sar0dines, instead offering slic- es of grilled pork that tastes both sugary (the marinade) and smoky (the result of fat dripping onto the flames).
They’ve succeeded. Baguette & Co.’s banh mi is a fine sandwich. Working from top to bottom, it has refreshing pickled carrot and daikon, whole cilantro sprigs for flavour and cucumber ribbons for crunch. Then comes the protein; there are other options besides grilled pork butt. Lastly comes chopped pork liver pâté and a slick of rich Vietnamese mayonnaise, made with whole eggs instead of just yolks. Baguette & Co. does many things well, especially the “feed it forward” initiative.
It may be the best $3.75 I spent that week.