The contents of this blog are matters of opinion formed over one more visits. There has been some artistry applied and metaphors and similes should not necessarily be taken literally.
We’re going to call Hòa Hưng a restaurant simply by virtue of the fact that even though they don’t officially offer any seating, there seems to be at least four people scoffing down dòufunǎo/ dòufuhuā / tofu fa just outside the store at any given time.
We happened upon Hoa Hung’s tiny tofu stand and the modest line outside it as we sought out a different restaurant in the area. Though I had known from my paediatrics colleague GZYL that there did exist dedicated tofu shops selling fried soft tofu in Sydney, I had not yet had the time or will to seek one out for myself.
The triangle tofu ($8/kg) was my favourite out of the things that we tried, though I do not know that outside of shape there would have been much difference between this and the square tofu. I’m known to love a good combination tofu hot pot (doufu bao, 豆腐煲) and it’s one of the dishes that I order almost without fail at a traditional Chinese restaurant. The silkiness of the tofu with the mildly fried exterior, bathed in the umami stew of vegetables, meat, and seafood is one of life’s simple pleasures, and up until this point I had never been able to make or find such fried tofu outside of a restaurant. All variations of fried tofu at the Asian grocery store are dry and shrivelled – great for hot pot in one sense of the term but not great for hot pot in the other. This fried triangle tofu ticked all of the boxes that I was looking to fill.
The tofu fa ($2.50), served with ginger syrup was a warm and silky dessert, smooth and delicious. It was not too sweet even with all of the ginger syrup added in, and additional syrup was available for 20 cents a packet. There is no savoury version on offer (the version I grew up with), but I guess you could always pour in some of your own soy sauce
Straight up white tofu ($7/kg) was warm, fragrant, and white as per the description.
OTHER COMMENTS These guys are here to sell tofu, and not to play any of your games. My partner didn’t know how much tofu she wanted, and the lady running the store essentially told her “up to you, doesn’t matter to me”. my partner countered with “one tofu please”.
The purpose of an embassy, if I understand correctly, its to put one’s best foot forward to foster communication and co-operation between parties. Unfortunately for coffee, its Northmead-based embassy does not quite cut the mustard.
Coffee Embassy’s chosen ambassador is their “famous” bacon and egg roll with housemade tomato relish ($8). Though proclaimed to be Northmead’s best on posters on the cafe’s structural poles, I found this bacon and egg roll to be very lacking. Though my first experience with this B&E in 2019 was actually quite positive, it all changed when I visited again in 2021. The 2021 iteration was overall quite a dry roll, with both the bread and bacon lacking any significant amount of moisture. The bacon was unusually hard, difficult to bite, chew, or enjoy. Though it’s Coffee Embassy’s signature dish, I though this roll was one of the worst I’ve ever had.
Moving on from the bacon and egg , we will now discuss this crispy pork banh mi ($8). Though I remember enjoying Coffee Embassy’s pork rolls when I first started eating there in 2019, I have, in recent times, grown accustomed to the excellent quality of crispy pork belly rolls at Hong Ha, Marrickville Pork Roll, and in the rest of the Eastern Suburbs. My most recent trips to Coffee Embassy have instead been met with grief. Coffee Embassy’s pork is drier, colder, and leaner than I had expected, a far cry from the standard crackling pork belly rolls you might get elsewhere. Furthermore, the promised crispiness was not locatable. Not great.
THOUGHTS I don’t know if Coffee Embassy has become markedly worse over the last few years, or if my tastes have just evolved and become more refined. Either way I’m glad that though they are an embassy they are not representative of banh mi as a whole. If you’re already in Northmead, Xcel Roll’s Parramatta store is not that far away.
I don’t know why it’s taken me 9 months to write this review. I don’t have any particularly good excuses, apart from the fact that we had eaten at so many places on our short trip to Melbourne that I had felt a little bit burnt out by all the reviewing, leaving it up to now, when I’ve run out of other things to procrastinate on, to do.
As it’s been nine months, this should not be considered a particularly comprehensive, or even useful piece of writing. It’s more just a few thoughts that I still remember pieced together from notes I jotted down during the meal, and some pictures to prove to myself in later years that I did indeed eat here on the 19th of April 2022.
We started the night with a number of snacks. Featured in the foreground here is oyster, coconut curry vinaigrette, shallot, pepperleaf, prepositions are of course not needed in high end cuisine. I enjoyed this deliciously creamy oyster, with its hint of curry flavouring. One of many creamy oysters we had that trip.
The next snack to discuss is this cracker of carrot, macadamia satay, sunflower, kakadu plum, with a good crispiness and a flavour that I think reminded us of tom yum, unless that was about the oysters.
The caramelised trout, green mango, muntries, prawn cracker was strongly reminiscent of the classic Chinese canned fish known as fried dace with black beans, commonly made by Nanmen Bridge company and sold in a yellow and red oval tin.
The ‘otak otak’, spanner crab curry, finger lime, rice crisp was yummy, and even though there was plenty of curry it was still easy to appreciate the sweetness and crabbiness of the crab.
The buttermilk roti, Sunda’s vegemite curry, a lauded secret item that you have to know about to order as a $20 supplement really wasn’t all that. The roti was very cripsy but hyper oily, but the flavour of the vegemite was at least pretty mild. We were advised that this was a must-not-miss at Sunda, but really I think you can miss it relatively safely. Not game changing.
This heirloom tomato, white sesame, davidson plum, pomelo salad was very fresh, so much so that I jotted down at the time “So fresh, hits of 2021” (I don’t know why specifically 2021, it was 2022 when I had this meal). There was a bit of a yellow curry-like (we found later that it was the white sesame curry paste) paste at the bottom of the tomatoes that had a night sweet and lightly spicy flavour., and some mouthfuls were a bit like white sugar on tomato, a common Northern Chinese snack dish.
The pork belly, rainforest tamarind, rhubarb, daikon radish was a pretty good entree. The meat was extremely tender, with the meat bits having great mouthfeel but unfortunately with too great a fat to lean pork ratio. The meat, “marinated with rainforest tamarind, coconut sugar and pomegranate molasses” as per Khanh Nguyen’s social media was very tangy, and in fact a bit too tangy for us. The lightly pickled daikon radish sheet, thin to the point of translucency, brought the tang back down a notch into mild enjoyability with a hint of sweetness.
The less good of our two mains was the bannockburn chicken, thai sausage, gai lan, bush apple. The gai lan was pretty good, cooked to a normal degree that you might find in any Chinese restaurant, not extraordinarily special. The chicken wrapped within it was moist and tender, delivered over the course of four or five separate slices, enough volume we thought. The Thai sausage had much ginger flavour. The bush apple went unnoticed. This was not an unreasonable main, but paled in comparison to our other choice.
Though people sing praises about their vegemite roti, I think Sunda’s true star dish is their koshihikari congee in a burnt onion broth with pickled cauliflower, confit egg yolk and paperbark oil. I’ve never enjoyed a congee as much in my entire life. This was such a warm and wholesome bowl, with a high degree of creaminess, soft delicate rice grains, and an almost potato mash-like soupy quality. The texture of the carbohydrate was creamy and the taste was mild, but the pool of broth surrounding it was absurd in its complex mix of sweet, salty, and sour flavours. The crispiness of the mushroom, cauliflower, and greens added great textural variation, whilst the opulent slow egg brought it all together with a third. Such a standout.
The gem lettuce, blood lime, shallot, nasturtium salad was truly an experience in whatever. Some of the leaves were a bit better, we did not enjoy. Unlike lilies, the nasturtium appear to be non-toxic to cats. Would you pay for your kitty to have dialysis?
I think this is the coconut sorbet with pineapple and kaffir lime granita, coconut jelly, desert lime jam, coconut yoghurt and sprinkled with candied green peppercorns. I didn’t love it – I think the pineapple was too pineapple for me.
The our take on pavlova, lychee, pandan, pepperberry was my preferred dessert, my more enjoyed part being the pepperberry ice cream. I am also fond of the Van Diemens Land Pepperberry & Leatherwood Honey ice cream that is available in tubs from some supermarkets though, and I did not think restaurant this was particularly superior. Neither of these two desserts really stood out.
We finished with petit fours, lamington pandan caneles with davidson plum. I am proud to announce that in the time between eating at Sunda and writing this review I now know how to pronounce “canelé” after being schooled by a guy at a bakery in Dulwich Hill NSW.
Quick verdict: We paid $130pp excluding drinks but including the vegemite roti, and I think it would be easy to recommend going back. We already had accommodation, and it would’ve been annoying to move between hotels, but when we ate at Sunda there was a promotion where you could book a night in hotel together with your meal for an extremely cheap price. Might be worth doing for Melbourne suburbanites looking for a nice South-East Asian fusion dinner.
This blog has never been about providing detailed insights into each molecule of food consumed, and in fact there is often several weeks or months of delay between actually having the meal and writing about it. I ate at Banh Cuon Ba Oanh in January 2021, eleven months ago, and this – together with the fact that the meal was eaten in a fugue like state following a night shift means that my memory is a bit hazy.
I’m fairly certain that this is the banh cuon dac biet (Ba Oanh’s SPECIAL steam rice noodle roll, mixed pork pieces and grilled pork – $17) with an extra side of cha que (Homemade fried cinnamon pork – $3). This was my first time trying banh cuon and I didn’t really know where to begin. (I now have a cool Vietnamese friend from work who I send photos of food to to ask how to eat them). My very uninformed opinion was that the whole thing was a bit dry, particularly the rice noodles which kind of just sucked moisture out of my mouth. The meat was fine, though also not very moist, and I definitely didn’t need to order extra meat on top of what was already included with the main meal. I wonder if a bit of tea or something might’ve gone a long way.
I’d probably like to come back and actually know how to eat what I’m eating before I eat it.
Saigon Rolls is a small Vietnamese restaurant in St Leonards serving a variety of banh mi, rice paper rolls, and pho. I dropped in on a chilly May morning for a couple of banh mi, eager to fill myself up before a day of minimally catered meetings.
This crackling pork roll ($8) was quite good. Lots of fresh-feeling salads, sufficient meat, at a reasonable price. Not the best I’ve had in my entire life, but did its job well.
The cold meat pork roll with double meat ($9) was really only fine. Again filled with a good amount of salad, I felt that the extra meat was not adequately balanced by extra pate or butter. Maybe it’s my own fault for not asking for double pate as well as double meat, but I find that in most places this balance is made automatically.
Saigon Rolls St Leonards Kiosk 5/436 Victoria Ave, Chatswood NSW 2067 (02) 9410 0988
