noodleoodle

Cafe Hien Nhi - (03) 9310 9151 - shop 3, 47 Alfrieda Street St Albans 3021

I got totally lost on the way out there, but on the trip home I realised that it’s not all that far away. As my mission statement is to “search for great and surprising food under my nose”, I was very happy with my trip to St Albans. I’d never given the place a second thought. The end of a train line, nothing else.

What I discovered was a pleasant little shopping area with a distinctly Vietnamese flavour. Bakeries, hair dressing salons and real estate agents compete for attention with Vietnamese and Chinese signage. Numerous Asian grocery stores sell fresh noodles, vegetables and you name it. There are a number of Viet/Chinese restaurants, but what got me impressed was the concentration of dedicated soup shops. There is a strip of three that have seating on the street. Bun Bo Hue is advertsed a lot.

The Restaurant that I had a quick bowl of soup at was called Hien Nhi. It was in a little lane way off Alfrieda Street. It was a pretty random choice. I liked the atmosphere of all the lads lazing at the tables on the footpath out front, cigarettes and hot tea flowing.

I ordered Hu Tieu, a noodle soup with pork broth. It was lovely, the broth was strong and aromatic, accompanied by thinly slice rare meat, lettuce, crunchy pork croutons, and spring onions. It wasn’t until after I’d throughly enjoyed this bowl of noodles that I realised that the house specialty was Bun Mam (noodle soup made from dried fish), maybe I should have ordered this…argh regrets…

This place is like home. The specialty is dumplings, either pork or beef, (they have started to do vego ones due to lobby group pressure, can’t be a good thing). My favorite is the dumplings in soup with chilli oil. These little buggers are fat and plump with a wonderful hand rolled doughy encasement. The filling is soft and tender minced pork that is poached briefly in some furiously steaming contraption. The soup is subtle and soothing but abruptly injected with some fiery chilli oil.

The order of things goes like this: Get directed to very worn laminex table, order dumplings, retrieve small bowl of soya sauce with chopped chilli (they never top the chilli up enough), get plastic cup of tea, wait less than one minute, eat over a dozen magnificent dumplings, pay, leave, repeat.

Dumplings in soup with chilli oil cost $5.80. Can you believe that? They do have numerous noodle dishes here but I’m so entrenched in my ways I haven’t had one.

Shanghai Dumpling Restaurant - (03) 9663 8555 - 23 Tattersalls Lane Melbourne 3000

Happy Birthday Cal!

Ramen takes the noodle soup to extremes. There are some people out there that are crazy about this stuff. I’d agree that it’s something you could get fanatical about. I’ve decided to include a bit of Ramen in noodleoodle. I visited Ajisen Ramen. This place looked a little swanky but also sported a fair degree of cheapness that made me feel at home. It has a decent selection of Ramen as well as heaps of other stuff. Not quite sure abot the “Aussie outback Ramen”, I think this is a hybrid we don’t need! It includes bacon, sausages that look like Frankforts and a pineapple slice, shudder…

I had Chasyu Ramen, and it came in a big hot solid bowl. The noodles were a thin round egg, kinda like little spaghetti. It was topped with heaps of dry fried spring onion and some seaweedy stuff. The pork was lovely, with a great combination of soft fat textures and roasted stringy meat rolled and sliced thinly. There were condiments available, ground chili, ground dried onion, white pepper, chili oil, and Japanese Soy. The first of many Ramens for noodleoodle, I hope.

My Ramen cost $9, they serve Asahi and Sapporo here.

Ajisen Ramen - (03) 9662 1100 - 130 Bourke St Melbourne 3000

I’m a bit puzzled as to why on earth they would want to have a bowl of noodles with a question mark rising from it, as their logo.

The Victoria St Correspondent (silent at this stage), dropped by the other day. He came with treats! He’d been over Footscray way and had dropped by the Little Saigon Market. It’s something that I haven’t mention yet, another brilliant food introduced to Australia by the Vietanmese, Báhn mi, (they’re call Vietnamese Pork Rolls in Melbourne). My god, what an invention. Vietnamese ingredients in a French baguette. The variations are endless, generally they contain pork products, salad, and three more types of pork products. The ones The Correspondent presented me with, had egg butter, liver pate, cucumber, picked carrot, soy sauce, chili sauce, and Barbecued pork balls from a skewer, (very garlicky).

The Correspondent also picked up a few Chinese treats. A couple of combination steamed buns, the big ones with Chinese sausage and quail egg. He also got what is referred to by his son as “Footballs”, (real name unknown). These were deep fried pastry/batter casings around a spiced mince pork filling. OK, but after a pork roll and steamed bun, they were hard going.

Little Saigon Market - (9687 3505) - Nicholson Street Footscray