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Vietnamese
The Lunch Lady
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“There’s always intent behind a dish,” says Chef Benedict Lim. “We never just make a dish because we think we want to put ingredients together. It’s always like, ‘Where does this originate from?’”
In the case of The Lunch Lady, the Ossington Street restaurant Lim helms, the story originates in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1995. Nguyen Thi Thanh, lovingly nicknamed The Lunch Lady, began serving soups and bites to locals out of a cart - a food truck of sorts - and quickly developed a community so strong that it caught the attention of famed food journalist Anthony Bourdain. Both Thanh and Bourdain passed away before the Toronto iteration came to life - the former just weeks before the doors opened on Ossington - and Lim feels it's his job to honour the legacies of two culinary giants.
“The way I want guests to resonate with that is that there’s this whole history - there’s a story, and I want to make sure that I never forget about the origins. I always tell guests that what they see now is an evolution of where it all started. It started with her street corner in Saigon, very humble,” Lim says. “When Bourdain went over there, he saw it was more than the food. It was the energy.”
Bringing it all together - that street corner in Saigon, The Lunch Lady’s Vancouver outpost, and the Toronto version - is what drives Lim. His menu pays homage to the cornerstones of The Lunch Lady’s community offerings, rooted in Vietnamese tradition, but it incorporates modern techniques, global flavours, and dishes only available in Toronto to create a unique set of offerings that complete the culinary story.
“This is inspired by a dish in Vietnamese called bò tái chanh, which literally translates to beef, raw lime and is a pile of sliced beef that’s been denatured, it’s a bit grey, almost ceviche-esque,” Lim says. “It’s a lot of herbs and raw onion, because Vietnamese people eat herbs like a salad. So what we did was we took all of those flavours and we turned it into a carpaccio. I would eat this dish every day, it’s just so refreshing and light.”
“The tiger prawns are done with a floating shell,” Lim says. “It took 12 iterations. Prawn after prawn, I was so saturated with prawn at the end of it. At the 11th iteration, I was going to give up, but I was so close that I just wanted to finish it.” The prawns have a light beer batter made of a rice lager that was born of a collaboration with Rainhard Brewing, and they’re served with a chilli lime sauce.
“Traditionally, steak lúc lāc is cubes of ribeye steak that’s wok fried with soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, onions, chillies, garlic, and then put over a bed of watercress with tomatoes, some onion, and it comes with a dip,” Lim says. “So we took that idea, and we kind of steakified it. It’s a ribeye beef, we took elements of that marinade and we turned it into our lúc lāc sauce, which is infused with green and black peppercorns from Vietnam and lúc lāc butter sauce.” The steak is blow-torched and served with crispy cassava and a watercress salad with lime vinaigrette.
“My cousin brought a cake to a family dinner one Christmas, and it was like a Hawaiian-style mochi cake,” Lim says. “So I took her recipe and I spun it, I made some adjustments based on how I wanted to prepare it. This version is a cake infused with pandan and coconut milk. And we take that cake and we treat it like French toast, so it’s a light batter and we fry it so it’s sticky and warm, and then we put the coconut condensed milk gelato that we make in-house on top. So it’s got a hot and cold thing. And then it’s got strawberry and red beans and a little crumb on top that’s a streusel made with mung beans.”
The Tropical Spritz is The Lunch Lady’s take on the Aperol Spritz, made with Beefeater, Aperol, prosecco, tropical fruit juice, lime, and soda. It’s light, bright, and refreshing, perfect for summer heat.
“Coffee culture is huge in Vietnam. If you wake up, you drink coffee. Before lunch, after you go drinking, you drink coffee. And to not celebrate that wouldn’t be telling the story correctly,” Lim says. “So we have classic Vietnamese coffee, done in the exact process.” One version is topped with pandan coconut cream.
“The Vietnamese coffee topped with egg sabayon is a Northern-style egg coffee,” Lim says. “It’s like dessert in a cup. It has a tiramisu-esque kind of feel.”
“A Negroni was actually Anthony Bourdain’s favourite drink,” Lim says. “So the original bar manager, Wayne Chow, had this idea to pour it through a coffee filter with grounds so it gets a coffee essence, and it was so whimsical and clever, and it just turned out so well.” It’s served tableside and, to honour tradition as they do so well, made with fresh ground Vietnamese coffee.
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