Little Saigon Bakery · Vietnamese Baguette
Victoria Street Banh Mi
📷 Closely related photo — Photo: HungryHuy (Huyzee Vu) / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
Richmond's Victoria Street earned the nickname 'Little Saigon' after Vietnamese refugees began opening bakeries and grocers there in the early 1980s, decades before banh mi became a familiar word outside Melbourne.
A crisp baguette is split and filled with pork or chicken, pate, pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, chilli and coriander, wrapped in paper for a few dollars. Bakeries along Victoria Street in Richmond and Hopkins Street in Footscray sell them fast, straight through the shopfront window.
Why it's made this way: Vietnamese refugees who settled in Melbourne after the Vietnam War built bakeries and grocers along Victoria Street and in Footscray from the late 1970s and 1980s onward, turning both strips into some of the strongest banh mi destinations in the country.
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