Phu Vinh

Combination pork and seafood hu tieu soup. Photo: Josh Robenstone

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93 Hopkins Street, Footscray, 9689 8719

My score: 3.5/5

Here’s the problem. You go into a cheapie Asian restaurant, page through a menu of 150 items and feel overwhelmed. How on earth can all those dishes be good, or even fresh? One solution – my preferred – is to find out the restaurant’s specialty. At Phu Vinh, that’s hu tieu, southern Vietnam’s answer to pho. Like pho, hu tieu is a noodle soup. Also like pho, it’s a soup of many variations, so it’s tricky to define, but it’s based on clear broth (often pork but here chicken) and special noodles.

Phu Vinh’s owners, Linh and Hien Du, have been making hu tieu from scratch here every day since the early 1990s (and for the last five years at the Phu Vinh in Sunshine too). Before that they served it from a stall at their home in Tra Vinh, south of Saigon. Basically, they know what they’re doing, and they do it with a lot of pride and care.

There are always batches in various stages of readiness. Chicken broth is cooked for 12 hours, filtered twice, then rested for eight hours. It’s rich yet sparkling. There are a few ways you can order the hu tieu: ‘dry’, that is with the soup on the side, with won tons, just pork or just seafood.

I reckon the combination pork and seafood with rice noodles is the way to go. It’s served in a massive bowl, bobbing with slow-braised pork slices, pork mince and liver, split prawns, calamari, fish balls and a quail egg. A housemade prawn cracker – very special, very crunchy – rests over the top. Fresh condiments – coriander, chives, lettuce, bean sprouts – are on hand too. Thin, springy, glassy rice noodles, made locally to the restaurant’s specifications and delivered daily, are the treasure lurking at the bottom of the bowl. It’s a complete meal, soulful and satisfying.

Other big sellers here are the bun rieu soup, a rosy swirl of crab and tomato, and the broken rice with pork chop and steamed pork custard. Ever popular rice paper rolls are fresh, crisp and pretty, and the bean and jelly ‘mocktail’ is a sweet meal all on its own.

Phu Vinh is on the street-facing perimeter of Footscray Market, so they’ve got freshness sorted, buying small quantities of meat and vegetables daily, and using them up each service. Sit in the restaurant or at the fun market-alley tables beyond. Service is perfunctory, creature comforts are few, but for a hu tieu ‘how to’ there’s no better place in Melbourne.

See their website.

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Earl Canteen, 500 Bourke Street, Melbourne, 9600 1995.
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MoVida, 1 Hosier Lane, Melbourne, 9663 3038.
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First published in The Age, 3rd October 2016