It’s worth trawling the menu at bustling Bankstown eatery VBites for Hue and central Vietnamese dishes not often found in Sydney restaurants.
14/20
Vietnamese$
Bun bo hue tends to get overshadowed by pho, but this rich beef bone broth – deeply fragrant with lemongrass and chilli – deserves equal star billing. Translated as “Hue beef soup”, this hearty dish from Central Vietnam is a soul-reviving bonanza of proteins: lean beef brisket, sliced pork, cha hue Vietnamese ham, pork hock and a shimmering slab of pork blood jelly piled on top of thick and chewy vermicelli noodles. Celebrated for its sweet, spicy and umami intensity, Anthony Bourdain once declared it “the greatest soup in the world”.
The soup is the most popular dish at VBites, a bustling eatery with seating that spills into the main shopping strip of Bankstown. It’s hard to miss the neon decorations, floor-to-ceiling timber, colourful menu photos or massive flatscreen – often showing live rugby league and Ultimate Fighting Championship matches – mounted on one wall. VBites is the kind of joint where you help yourself to cutlery and tissues, but also house-made satay sauce and pickled garlic.
Owner Nam Phan opened the restaurant in 2014, a time he recalls when all the shops on the block closed by 5pm and the street lights weren’t even turned on at night. Originally, VBites traded solely in Central Vietnamese dishes that reflected Phan’s family origins. Today the menu is 70 dishes strong, including southern-style pho and crispy skin chicken to meet customer demand, plus a strong showing of vegan and vegetarian options.
It’s still worth trawling the menu for Hue and Central Vietnamese dishes not often found in Sydney restaurants. Once the capital of Vietnam, Hue was once home to the Nguyen Dynasty royal families and remains renowned for its royal cuisine of refined and flavour-packed dishes.
Steamed banh nam and banh bot loc dumplings arrive wrapped in banana leaves like tiny presents. Doused in sweet nuoc cham fish sauce dressing, their sticky-chewy softness is strangely addictive. Banh nam is more soft and supple; banh bot loc has a denser tapioca flour chew. Both are studded with pork and prawn.
Banh beo steamed rice cakes are another Hue staple, piled on a plate and loaded liberally with pork crackling, pork mince, house-made tom kho prawn floss, sauteed shallots and thick hunks of cha hue ham. The cha hue ham is made in-house, a mixture of pork and its fat, pepper, salt, sugar and fish sauce wrapped in banana leaves, steamed and then sliced. (It’s not too far removed from the cha lua you find in banh mi pork rolls.)
Most restaurants will buy in their cha hue, but Phan is insistent on making his own. “We don’t add any flour,” he says. “Most people add tapioca flour – ours is all pork.”
Tiny clams in the com hen baby clam noodle salad are tender and abundant. Eat it alongside or on top of giant shards of toasted sesame rice crackers, revelling in the refreshing tumble of roasted peanuts, pickled carrots, mint, lettuce and tart green apple slices. Add the mam nem (fermented anchovy sauce) if you’re game.
Mi quang noodle soup yields a hearty mix of whole prawns, pork, chicken, quail eggs and crushed peanuts atop flat turmeric yellow noodles. Throw in the side plate of herbs, bean sprouts and shredded banana blossoms to the soup and add a squeeze of lemon as you prefer.
The bun bo hue reigns supreme, though. Like its pho cousin, the soup is traditionally a breakfast food, but Sydneysiders happily slurp it all day long. Pham says the kitchen uses up to 200 kilograms of beef bones each week to make the stock, first boiled for 12 hours and then left to simmer throughout the day. For diners not too keen on pork hocks or pigs’ blood, the kitchen will happily exclude them if requested.
There’s only one dessert on the menu: deep-fried, pastry-wrapped ice-cream, but you could just as easily finish with a takeaway fruit smoothie and walk off the noodles. These days, Canterbury-Bankstown Council turns on the street lights at night.
The low-down
Vibe: Lively family-run eatery teeming with locals and blow-ins
Go-to dishes: Bun bo hue ($18.50); com hen clam noodles ($18.50); banh bot loc banana leaf pork and prawn dumplings (four for $9)
Drinks: Vietnamese iced coffee and a tropical rainbow of fruit smoothies; free BYO
Cost: About $60 for two, excluding drinks
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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Helen Yee is a restaurant reviewer for Good Food.
