Meet the Saigon Sub: A Foot of Food Court Wonder

I dare you to resist that yeasty smell of freshly baked demi-baguettes stacked high with fragrant cilantro stalks, a tangle of carrots, crisp slivers of cucumber, peppery beef or chicken satay that wafts out of Bake Chef in Mac Hall’s Food Court.

Few of us can, which is why we called up owners Phong and Mai Vu to find out what makes their subs so cult-worthy, they can sell, after all, 400 of these toasted babies on a busy day.

It turns out the Vu family (refugees from Vietnam) got their Canadian start in a bakery in Cranbrook, B.C., where Phong’s dad, Khac, learned English while punching and pinching bread dough into all sorts of artful shapes. A few years later, or so the story goes, a local German baker closed shop and sold his recipes to Khac, who then stuffed them into a shoe box.

When Khac moved his family to Calgary in 1998, “he wanted to throw out those recipes, thinking he’d never use them again,” laughs Phong. 

But, in 2006, the Bake Chef location at UCalgary became available and Khac snapped it up, hauling out that precious box of treasured recipe cards and adding subs to the menu. Not long after, most of the Vu family began working shifts at the little shop, toiling from 5 a.m. (when the baguettes have to be made — yes, they create their own) and shutting things down at 7 or 8 p.m., seven days a week. 

“There are always students, here,” explains Phong, who continues to use his father’s recipes for the cookies, muffins, cinnamon buns and baguettes Bake Chef serves every day. “And they are always hungry.” 

As for a “secret recipe,” say the one that makes their Spicy Beef w/Cheese Sub their No. 1 seller, Phong isn’t giving anything away. He does, however, stress that everything is made from scratch (no frozen bread or cookie dough here), and that all the ingredients are über-fresh and bought at local Asian markets.