There are two generations of Vietnamese restaurants in Footscray, Melbourne. The first emulates the tile-and-mirror-walled, cheap metal table joints of the streets of Saigon. The architecture sends a message that hosing down the walls could be a priority, the hall of mirrors effect suggests that the appearance of being busy is as important as really being busy. The second generation is identical to upmarket phở chain, Phở 24 with dark timber panelling, dark timber seats, white plates, the appearance that they’re one frappucino short of a Starbucks. In Footscray, both tend to serve the same menu; interior design is not ...
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My local market doesn’t have a website, so as something of a community service, here is the opening hours of the Footscray Market over the Christmas/New Year’s period. 24 Dec – open 7:00am-6:00pm 25-28 Dec – closed 29-30 Dec – open 7:00am-4:00pm 1 Jan – closed 2 Jan -7:00am-4:00pm Hùng Vương, Footscray (7)Bánh Xèo from Đình Sơn (4)Phở Chu The, Footscray (15)Queen Victoria Market Borek (10)Northern Thai in Western Melbourne: Bonus Content (0)
It's the race that stops the nation and keeps Melbourne's milliners in business. Living not far from the track means that I've seen heaps of feathered finery so this Melbourne Cup I snapped a couple of fascinators while escaping the throng.Made from feathers, flowers or fur and later on in the day bits of bread, beer caps and raceday flotsam, the fascinator is best seen in the morning. By the end of the day they're teetering on the edge like the drunk on high heels who is probably supporting this elaborate construction. The wave of style washes in early as ...
You could probably map pho in Footscray as a means to learn Vietnamese legends of prehistory. Hùng Vương was a mythical king; the founder of the first Vietnamese dynasty. He descended from a dragon and taught the Vietnamese people to cultivate rice. Nothing of Hùng Vương’s past can be verified. The restaurant Hùng Vương’s past is easily verified. It has been serving up phở on Hopkins Street, Footscray, for almost two decades – a period that has seen it gentrify from cheap phở joint to slightly upmarket phở joint. The renovations from a few years ago – dark timber veneer ...
There was an interesting article in The Age last Sunday about the coffee offerings around Melbourne. According to Justin Metcalf, it’s not great. Metcalf is an expert, apparently. OK, so he teaches would-be baristas at the Box Hill Institute, and works as a “consultant” to cafes wanting to “better themselves”. Oh, and he’s chairman of the World Barista Championships. Bah! He is an expert then! But I can’t help but feel so terribly annoyed when jack-a-dandy’s like Metcalf and this writer for The Age lounge around Melbourne’s cafes blah-blah-blah-ing on about how it’s really not up to scratch. Yet on the ...
Yes, I’m going a bit nuts on the Vina diacritics. The equation that can’t be avoided when you travel for food is the one where you compare Third World prices to First World and try to account for the differences, offseting rent, ingredient quality and labour. It is a fun but fruitless diversion. The above bánh xèo from Quan Đình Sơn, next to Saigon Supermarket in Footscray is $10 for a crepe the size of your forearm. A full cubit of bánh xèo. $10 would buy 16 plates of bánh xèo from my local market in Cambodia but it wouldn’t ...
I had grand plans to work my way through the phở of the Melbourne suburb of Footscray, bucket-sized bowls of beef soup every weekend, but never quite got there. There are no less than 20 phở establishments within easy walking distance but every time that I kick things off, I get the nagging feeling that it is just not worth the effort. Phở in Melbourne is above average. Terrible phở is the exception (but not impossible to find). Brilliant phở only exists in people’s homes. I’d love to be proven wrong. You’ll never find a rich, herbal phở on the streets ...
Austin Bush has been hanging out with me in Melbourne over the last week and we’ve been doing the sort of thing that food bloggers do when they run into each other: drink every single pale ale made in Australia and New Zealand; eat several times a day with no regard for socially accepted “meal times”; and cook food that takes regional authenticity to ludicrous lengths which he has amply documented on his Thai food blog. Both Austin and I are huge fans of Northern Thai food, the cuisine that skirts the Burmese border in Thailand’s northern provinces. He’s been ...
I've seen a photo of a much older Royal Hotel on this prominent corner in Footscray dating from around the 1880s but I don't know if this is a complete rebuild or a make-over. So many Melbourne pubs were renovated during the 20s and 30s to help them prevent their hotel licences being recinded and the pub closed by the authorities.In any case it is a great hotel, a great ship even, with a rounded facade on the apex of the corner.The decoration is minimal with some speedlines on the parapet and tiled columns either side of the entrance.I ...
I like the brickwork on this old factory in Footscray.The use of different coloured bricks creates horizontal bands along the facade of the building.The cream bricks have been arranged to provide the decoration. The band above the upper storey windows have bricks set on their end, angled and set back from the level of the other courses of bricks.The band of bricks above the second level windows are much more interesting. The central band again consists of bricks standing vertically on their end but above and below this band the bricks have been laid on an angle so ...
Chinese food in Australia is for the most part, awful, but it is an awfulness within which you can revel. Steak and black bean sauce, paint-liftingly acidic lemon chicken, your-meat-of-choice stir-fried with cashew nut and cornstarch. Fried rice with peas in it and those little prawns (jumbo krill?) from a can that only exist to populate this specific dish. I still have a lot of love for it, mostly because it represents a resolutely Australian cuisine. It does bear a passing resemblance to Cantonese food, if you squint hard enough and have a terrible aversion to vegetable matter, offal and ...
When I was exploring the Sun Theatre this morning I spent most time taking photos in The Grand.As with most of the other cinemas in the Sun Theatre complex, The Grand is named after a former local cinema and it lives up to its name. Occupying the original stalls area of The Sun, this cinema has the most original art deco features. The picture above shows the amazing decorations of the walls near what is now the front of the auditorium. The orientation of the seating has been switched in the Sun’s new configuration as a multi-plex. ...
I’ve written previously about my favourite cinema, the Sun Theatre in Yarraville. I also wrote that I had the chance to explore the complex without the inconvenience of any audiences in the cinemas.I headed upstairs first of all to the lounge area with its porthole window, period furniture and monogrammed Sun Theatre carpet.The original balcony of the Sun has been converted into The Barkly, named after a former cinema in nearby Footscray. Some of the original decoration has survived on the walls in this area of the building and this was one of the first areas to be ...
I went to the Sun Theatre early this morning, very early for a Sunday anyway. The Art Deco Society had organised a showing of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day starting at 10:15 and before that there was morning tea but more importantly, the cinemas were open for us to explore.As I wrote in a previous post, The Sun Theatre is an original Art Deco cinema which opened in 1938 and after falling into disrepair has been refurbished over the past decade and now houses six boutique Art Deco cinemas.As much as possible of the original decoration was saved ...
Bánh mì xiu mai is the ultimate culinary mashup: a strange interpretation of Cantonese food in a French baguette via Saigon. The banh mi is your average baguette filled with a slap of pate, pickled carrot and stalks of coriander. The xiu mai part is utterly bewildering. Picking the xiu mai from the sauce The Vietnamese version of the Cantonese siew mai bears only the most basic resemblance to its Chinese compadre. It is both made from ground pork and is the size of a golf ball but lacks the thin wonton skin of the Cantonese dumpling. Instead of being gently ...
The Sun Theatre is my favourite cinema. While not the closest to where I live, it is not so far out of the way that I feel put out to go there. Nestled at the top end of Ballarat Street in Yarraville, an inner western suburb of Melbourne, The Sun is literally a beacon for the area.So why do I like the Sun? For a start it is Art Deco. It opened in 1938 and displays several telegrams in the foyer from various Hollywood stars celebrating the first night. But by the 1990s, the building ...
Which was how my friend J summarized my decision to move back to Melbourne. I personally have nothing against Bill Granger and he has nothing at all to do with my decision to not move anywhere near him. The other reason to move to Sydney seems that in my absence, the rental property market in Melbourne has gone to hell. The delicious dividend of the hellacious market is the following bánh mì thịt heo nướng, stumbled upon while I was between real estate agents in Footscray. It is the real deal and unlike the properties that I saw, worth waiting in ...
