My father is this blog’s first foreign correspondent. On assignment in Hanoi just the other day, his camera phone snapped these images of how I wish Victoria St could be. I tell you, if you went to many places in old South East Asia and bought the entire fitout — well, perhaps not this restaurant’s — and installed it into some shell in Melbourne, you’d make a killing. This is the yellow fish restaurant. That’s all they sell, but it’s packed out. They don’t waste this stuff on the tourists, but very expensive and increasingly-difficult-to-come-by sauce made out of the eyes of particular insects is the traditional accompaniment. You just can’t buy this stuff in Victoria St, along with so much else of Vietnam’s glorious cuisine. More photos here.

I suppose cock fights just wouldn’t go down too well with the inner city white types sure to come, but something other than blaring loudspeakers is needed to pep up the Vietnamese festival. What does save the festival for this whitey is the food, real Vietnamese food like you get in Vietnam, rather than the Chinesey stuff which the Vietnamese restaurant industry has settled on for Melbourne. Thinking I was buying expensive fried potatoes, I ended up with some fried bits of cut-up rice cake with an egg fried into it, and then various sauces poured over it, some chilli paste in the corner. That was good, and had Miss K smacking her lips. I enjoyed the curiously pink bananas encased in a thick layer of sticky rice covered with damn thick coconut cream, and a pork satay with all the flavour of meat cooked on a barbecue of coals. We are yet to tackle the purple sticky rice and mungbean paste sandwich pressed into a mould so as to make a beautiful new year’s pattern. I didn’t go the ubiquitous minced beaf wrapped in la lot leaves, grilled — been there done that. These “pepper leaves” are a member of the wild betel family, according to Mai Pham, glossy dark green heart-shaped things, and this dish, bo nuong la lot is part of bo bay mon, beef seven ways. It has garlic, onions, lemongrass, roasted peanuts, turmeric, fish sauce, sugar, salt, and coarsely ground beef.

The Abbotsford blogger does not have a camera at the moment, a want which is starting to hurt, but he is also soon not to have an income for a while, so it might have to stay that way. But I discovered a fellow Flickrite in Abbotsford — Ciaostabella, but I dub her My Friend Flickr — who kindly agreed to take some photos for me, including the one in this post, and Donina was there capturing the action, unasked. If you have any photos, you would consider sharing, please send them to contactme@abbotsfordblog.com.

No Thai restaurants there, but damn were there a lot of mangoes. It’s the height of mango season, and box after box-full were there in many of their manifestations. Some of the most beautiful combinations of colours are to found on the skin of a mango, but my point and clicker could not do them justice in the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights. There were the somewhat cashew-nut-shaped ones, and the burstingly rotund ones, the bright pink, the bright gold, the gorgeous speckled fruit tingle ones, and the green. And slices were set out on a plate for tasting, accompanied by salt and chilli into which you dipped them and ate them, and, in the case of the green ones, fish sauce and chilli.

There were live lobsters to be had ($65 a kilo), plenty of live barramundi ($15 a kilo), both swimming around in tanks, and even the fish out of water in the glass cabinets were still flapping around. Mr Nguyen asked if I had ever eaten live fish, by which he meant, thankfully, just-killed fish, and I said no. He assured me the experience was “absolutely  different”. He is a man with discerning tastes: does not eat frozen food, will not buy peeled prawns, and I have no doubt he is right. There were fresh local shellfish which you don’t find except in Asian fishmongers. There were banana flowers, banana roots, galangal galore, longans, durians, jackfruit and all the “normal” stuff, not to mention $10 bunches of peonie roses.
Then there were the greens: in the mosaic above, there are one of the magnificent mints and pumpkin leaves. Twenty or thirty varieties, only a few of which would be available in a non-Vietnamese supermarket — coriander, celery, Vietnamese mint, spinach, what we call bok choy, and, if you were lucky, Thai basil. Vietnamese cuisine is heavily dependent on these herbs, and they are what make good Vietnamese food so delicious and unique. I bought, for 50c, a mixed bunch of mints and other cooking herbs. I threw a similar bunch into a salad with prawns and lettuce the other day and Miss K went gaga about it.

Details:

LITTLE SAIGON
Nicholson Street, Footscray, 9687 3505
Melway: 42 C4
Open: Monday-Thursday 9am-6pm, Friday 9am-9pm, Saturday 9am-7pm, Sunday 9am-6pm
Stalls: 30
Transport: Tram 82 from Moonee Ponds; numerous buses pass nearby, including 472 (Moonee Ponds to Williamstown), 223 (Yarraville to Highpoint) and 402 (East Melbourne to Footscray); train to Footscray station.
Parking: 100 on site

Noodlepie’s is a beautiful blog (just check out the detail in “The Vietnamese pate mystery“), but it’s Saigonese (and its author seems to live now in Toulouse which is going to make it hard for him). My interests lie more with Hanoi. Sticky Rice covers the food of Hanoi excellently, and in trying to find anything of interest about the Footscray Vietnamese Market in English on the web just now, I came across evidence that Mr or Mrs Rice came to Melbourne in May. The Ricester sampled our pho and declared it to be Saigonese in style and damned good too. It’s his photo — yes, I’m lazy.

The Foodies Guide to Melbourne seems to have just come into a new 2007 edition. In expounding the theory that Melbourne is the food capital of Australia, one of its authors, Allan Campion, makes special mention of the refurbished Minh Phat, an Asian supermarket which has set up one vacant lot back from the corner of Nicholson and Victoria Sts in Abbotsford, in what was recently a truly dreadful furniture store of large proportion which I was surprised struggled on as long as it did. This is kind of the Ikea of Asian supermarkets, though I have not spent much time in there yet. Keep meaning to. I paid $3 for a plastic packet of coriander in Clifton Hill this morning and wished I had had the time to get a fresher bunch for 80c on Victoria St, its stock-making roots still attached. The rest of Campion’s article is worth a read, but this is what he says about Minh Phat:

“I’ve also been bowled over by the stunning new Minh Phat in Abbotsford. For more than 25 years this foodstore has sold Asian ingredients in Victoria Street and at the Queen Victoria Market. Now the proprietors have taken a huge step across Victoria Street and opened an emporium of Asian ingredients. Huge, clearly laid out, beautifully lit and spacious, the store’s shelves are filled with every brand of fish sauce, curry powder, coconut milk and Chinese cooking wine you could ever need. One must-have product is the beautifully balanced Kim Vee Wong brand of soy sauce imported from Taiwan ($4 a litre). A bonus is that the floor staff speak English.”

Thanks to Gareth, an Englishman, for the beautiful image of a mangosteen, now readily available in Victoria St.

Well, The Age bar reviewers have been hard at work, recently reviewing:

• Gertrudes at the Exhibition Gardens end of Gertrude St in Fitzroy (pushing the boundaries of this little blog’s sphere of interest, it has to be said), owned by an astrophysicist and with lawyers pulling beer (apparently);
• The Vic, on the corner of Park St and Victoria St (I endorse the sentiments of the reviewer and was fascinated and delighted to learn that you can have Victoria St Vietnamese delivered there); and
• Lambs Go Bar, a bluestone building in Greeves St, just off Smith St, boasting 100 beers at any one time and has an amusing website. The first Tuesday of every month is “Wheel of Beer” where $5 buys you a spin of the wheel and a random beer from their selection.

All places where you have a good chance of avoiding glitterati, if that’s your thing, as it is often mine. The photo is of Portland’s Jeff Wallen’s grandfather’s beer collection.

I came across this attractive blog about streetfood in Saigon, more correctly known now as Ho Chi Minh city. It will serve as a useful touchstone in the cutting edge investigative journalism this blog will engage in in answering the question: is Victoria St’s food Chinese or Vietnamese? Meanwhile, just enjoy it. For balance, have a look at Sticky Rice, a food blog about Hanoi food. Friends from Hanoi study in Melbourne and their cooking is to die for and not much like Victoria Street’s at all. The photo is from noodlepie’s flickr pages and depicts my favourite foods: pork rolls bursting with another favourite food, coriander. More about pork rolls, much more, in due course.