The world from the perspective of Melbourne's best suburb
Shanaka Fernando (left), Lentil As Anything‘s founder, is celebrating winning the Metropolitan Local Hero Award in the Australian of the Year Awards, 2007. According to the Herald Sun, he was last year living in a tent on the Elwood foreshore. His is an interesting life. He was raised a buddhist in a wealthy Sri Lankan family and came to Australia in 1989 to study law. He founded Lentils after travellling extensively through Africa, Asia, and South America. More about him anon.
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. Continue reading “A trip to Footscray — the true Little Saigon — with Mr Nguyen”
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.