Thy’s Banh Mi

Every banh mi at Thy's is built on the same foundation: a split baguette, a layer of Vietnamese pork pâté and mayonnaise, pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, and cilantro. What changes is the protein, and that single choice carries the whole sandwich. The BBQ pork brings chargrilled, smoky edges against the tang of the pickles; the honey garlic sausage swaps in a sweet-savoury marinade over the same bread; the assorted cold cut leans into pâté and Vietnamese deli meats. Thy's is a focused Vietnamese sandwich counter in the downtown core of London, and it draws its range from variations on one well-made thing — char siu pork, char siu chicken, BBQ chicken, sweet pork, lemongrass chicken, bacon and pâté, fried egg, fish cake, sardine, and a vegan tofu build among them.

The build is what makes that breadth work. Pâté and mayonnaise give each sandwich its base richness, the pickled carrot and daikon cut through it, and the cilantro keeps the whole thing bright — the architecture that lets banh mi travel from a Saigon street cart to a Canadian lunch counter without losing its character. A house-made sauce ties the chargrilled proteins to the bread. Sticky rice runs as a second anchor, including an assorted cold cut version that moves the same proteins onto a rice plate for anyone who wants the flavours without the baguette. A current crispy pork section pushes that logic further, spreading a single preparation across a sandwich, a sticky rice plate, and a vermicelli bowl.

What lifts Thy's past an ordinary sandwich shop is the drink list. The Vietnamese iced coffee — strong drip coffee cut with condensed milk and poured over ice — is the obvious pairing, but it is only the entry point. Thy's also makes coconut coffee, salted coffee, creamy egg coffee, and straight condensed milk coffee, alongside a kumquat-salted-plum cooler, cocoa, jasmine tea, and a current matcha lineup. That is a real beverage program running behind a banh mi menu, and it changes how people use the place. A coconut coffee is reason enough to stop in without ordering a sandwich at all.

Thy's has been making banh mi since 2022, and it now works out of a Dundas Street storefront, settled into the downtown core where the lunch crowd is densest. The kitchen keeps long hours — open from late morning into the evening six days a week, closed Sundays — which gives it more range than a counter built for the noon rush alone. It covers a midday sandwich, an after-work dinner, an afternoon coffee, or a takeout order routed through the delivery apps it lists. There is modest indoor seating for anyone eating in, but much of the menu is made to travel.

The menu is built for repeat traffic, and the details show it. The proteins are specific enough to become a regular's standing order, and the BBQ pork and honey garlic sausage banh mi are the two people tend to name first. Prices stay in quick-meal territory, so the math works whether the order is a single sandwich or a sandwich, a side of sticky rice, and a coffee. The narrow lineup also means the kitchen makes the same things often — which is how a counter this size keeps its sandwiches consistent from one visit to the next.

Plenty of Vietnamese kitchens chase breadth: pho, rice plates, hot pot, the full canon on one laminated menu. Thy's goes the other way. It commits to the sandwich, builds more than a dozen versions of it, and lets a real coffee program do the work a sprawling menu usually does. The focus is deliberate, and on a downtown block where lunch options turn over constantly, a counter that does a few things well and makes them easy to return to is the kind that holds its ground.