Bon Me | Bold, Fresh, and Fun Vietnamese Cuisine

We have new locations coming in April!  Starting April 1st we’ll be adding shifts at Cleveland Circle, 220 Clarendon, and Stuart Street.  We’re also nearly done with our second truck, and by mid-April we’ll be adding lunch shifts at Belvidere St., the Milk St., and City Hall Plaza!  Here is the full rundown:

April 1st

Monday: Dewey Square 11-2:30, Cleveland Circle 3:30-8

Tuesday: Dewey Square 11-2:30, BU East 3-8

Wednesday: Dewey Square 11-2:30, BU East 3-8

Thursday: Dewey Square 11-2:30, BU East 3-8

Friday: Dewey Square 11-6

Saturday: Stuart St. 11:30-2:45, 220 Clarendon 3-7

Sunday: 220 Clarendon 11:30-6

In mid April we will be extending Dewey Square hours and adding the following shifts:

Monday: Belvidere St. 11:30-2:30

Tuesday: Belvidere St. 11:30-2:30

Wednesday: Belvidere St. 11:30-2:30

Thursday: City Hall Plaza 11-3

Friday: Milk St 11-2:45

Follow @bonme on Twitter for the latest updates!

Starting Monday, October 31st, we’ll be at Dewey Square three days a week for lunch, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays! We’re really excited about the new location, and hope to see you there. The truck will be found on the Greenway, right outside of South Station.

Our current schedule can be found below, mark your calendars! (Bonus points if you hit us twice in one day!)

Mondays:
Dewey Square: 11am – 2:30pm
Boston University East: 3:15pm – 8pm

Tuesdays:
City Hall Plaza: 11am – 2:30pm
Boston University East: 3:15pm – 8pm

Wednesdays:
Dewey Square: 11am – 2:30pm
Boston University East: 3:15pm – 8pm

Thursdays:
City Hall Plaza: 11am – 2:30pm
Boston University East: 3:15pm – 8pm

Fridays:
Dewey Square: 11am – 2:30pm

Saturdays:
Copley Square: 11:30am – 5pm

photo by Melissa Jay

It’s been an exciting first month of business for us.  We really appreciate all the support everyone has given us, and we’re having a lot of fun learning the intricacies of serving amazing food from a truck.  As a business we are constantly striving to improve, so we’re going to put up a short series of blog posts looking at some of the cool things we’re working on:

Sourcing:

As of tomorrow morning, we’ll be using organic tofu.  Using high-quality ingredients is one of our primary goals, and we’ve decided that spending a bit more on our tofu will be well worth the investment.  As an added bonus, I think the new tofu is going to work better in our food as well.  Our current tofu has been a bit too soft, it gets a bit too moist and doesn’t work as well as we’d like with the sandwich.  This switch should be an upgrade all around, but let us know what you think!

We’re also looking at other ways we can improve our ingredients.  Hopefully we’ll have a big announcement shortly, but we’re still working out the details, and I don’t want to jump the gun.  Also as the growing season starts here, we’ll be working in as many local ingredients as we can.  You’ll see some great veggies in our noodle salads and we’ll have some amazing vegetable sides.

A few days ago, Ali and I drove to Connecticut to check out the progress on the Bon Me Truck.  We were very excited and also a bit nervous.  After all, this truck is essentially going to be our business for the foreseeable future, and we’ve put a ton of time and invested much of our savings into making sure it comes out just right.  We had diagrams and discussed every detail with the builder, but it’s still a question whether the result would be what we envisioned.

In a few months we'll be serving banh mi sandwiches through this window!

When we walked into the garage, we saw our bright-yellow truck sitting in the corner with a giant serving window cut in the passenger side.  The roll-up door on the back was replaced with brand-new hinge doors with two windows cut in each door.  We also have a smaller window cut into the driver’s side to make the truck feel a bit more open.  We really wanted the truck to feel very light and open, and all these windows are a big part of that.  We also got a translucent fiberglass roof on the truck rather than the standard aluminum to let more light in during the day.  Our service window is about eight feet wide and set low to allow people to see into the truck and interact with our cooks more easily.  We want to go for an open-kitchen feel on the truck, and I think it’s going to work out quite nicely.

A peek into our truck

Stepping inside the truck, we could see that all the major equipment had been installed.  Steve (from CMS) is custom-building the steam table, so that’s still a work in progress.  Most of the other major items needed to be hooked up, but we could get a feel for the truck.  I’m very glad we found a wide truck, as the inside actually feels pretty spacious.  We had a scary moment when Steve referred to our fridge as a freezer.  Our sandwich table also had a fridge underneath, so Steve was assuming the separate fridge was a freezer.  Nothing frozen in our truck…we just need an extra fridge to hold all the stuff we’re going to sell!  Fortunately Steve had ordered and installed the right thing, so disaster averted.

Here is the new window we're putting above the steam table

We spent some time with Steve mapping out the shelving and some other minor details of the truck. All in all it’s looking great, and it should be done really soon.