Rose's Vietnamese Sandwiches, Toronto

I keep passing this place on Gerrard Street in East Chinatown, but I'm always en route to a lunch or dinner, if not a second dinner, so I have never had the stomach time to try out one of Rose's Vietnamese sandwiches. While it's more common now than ever to call these sandwiches banh mi's, this linguistic disparity made me realize that this place has been around for a long time. At last, I had an hour between meetings one day, and even though I was downtown in the central Chinatown, I hopped onto the streetcar and went over the DVP for this guy.

Rose's also offers lots of other treats, but I stuck to the the game plan and just got the assorted and a juice box to go. Even wrapped in plastic, the scent was incredibly overpowering, as I could smell it the entire way back downtown even if in my bag. This is quite a feat coming from a cold sandwich! Chomping it down outside before a screening, I also couldn't bare to eat this inside as there's no way this could have been a discrete meal. I don't know what about it made it so strongly scented, but I will gladly go back to find out.

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