Opened in Aug. 2017, mom-and-pop style Mordisko Cakes is a restaurant that offers Vietnamese sandwiches and more. Located in downtown San Mateo, the door opens into a unique little restaurant that offers a different taste of Vietnamese food. This restaurant is run by a husband and wife who work as the cashiers and wrap all orders.
Mordisko Cakes offers a small, concise menu. Ranging from sandwiches to spring rolls, Banh Mi is a French-Vietnamese cuisine restaurant. Their most popular dishes include the grilled pork sandwich, lemongrass beef sandwich, grilled chicken and lemongrass tofu. Ingredients used in the dishes are fresh with no MSG.
Like other sandwich restaurants, Mordisko Cakes doesn’t have much space to sit and dine, having only three tables for all customers. However, it is a perfect place to get some food to take to Central Park, two blocks away from the restaurant. Since the food is not pre-made, a sandwich takes around 15 to 20 minutes to prepare. For a quick run in, placing your order through Grubhub so you can pick up your food right away is a good consideration.
There are 15 items to choose from on the menu plus the extra sides. Each item on the menu interested me but I decided to order the Pork Belly sandwich. Each sandwich is accompanied by a bag of potato chips and is tied with a thin rope string around the paper wrapping. The sandwich bread is delivered from a French bakery and has a crispy but soft texture which balances the content of the sandwich thoughtfully. Coated on the sandwich bread is a pasty pâté filling which creates, the first taste of the sandwich when you bite in. Pâté is made animal liver, but tastes a lot better than one would imagine. The vegetables inside the sandwich includes cucumber, cilantro, shredded carrots and daikon, a type of radish. These vegetables add more of a moist texture and fresh flavor to the sandwich so it isn’t completely dry. The well-cooked meat in the Vietnamese sandwiches adds weight to the hearty meal. The choices of meat for the sandwiches include grilled chicken, pork, pork belly, beef and ham. All of these components contribute to the overall balanced taste of each bite of the sandwich. The amazing thing about banh mi is that there are multiple distinct ingredients that all blend well together. The harmonic balance of vegetables, meat and sauce make the sandwich enjoyable to eat because there are no distractions of overpowering or bland tastes.
Mordisko is different from Lee’s Sandwiches even though they both make Vietnamese sandwiches. Lee’s uses baguettes whereas Mordisko uses a wider and shorter bread loaf. Another restaurant that has an outstanding banh mi sandwich is Mendocino Farms Sandwich Market. In the Mendo’s Original Pork Belly Banh Mi isn’t the traditional Vietnamese sandwich like Mordisko Cake’s. It’s bread is pressed down and toasted flat in the panini press but still carries all of the classic flavors of the original banh mi sandwich. With a new look and some new flavors but traditional taste, this sandwich thoughtfully carries on as a new version of a banh mi sandwich.
The quality of food meets the standard of a good Vietnamese sandwich but didn’t wow me as much as others listed above. Mordisko Cakes provides French-Vietnamese style dishes and sandwiches which are unbeatable but the capacity and waiting time makes the restaurant just short of perfect.
Most sandwich places prepare the sandwiches in the moment and don’t have much seating which is a negative. If this is the norm of sandwich places, then Banh Mi is on the same level of these standards and isn’t above them like Mendocino Farms Sandwich Market.
