Herr Nguyen may be off to Seoul — good for his korea — and so we finally got round to driving over to Footscray to check out the thing that makes Victoria St look like a pale imitation. That thing is the Vietnamese market. I had long thought the Nguyens had been taking the train to the Footscray Market proper, but discovered that there is a second exclusively Vietnamese market, established in 1992. If you hanker after overseas travel but are short of cash, you could go and stay the night in Little Saigon. Once inside the Vietnamese Market, it only takes the ignoring of a small amount of English writing to suspend disbelief.
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