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Ngon Ngon

Matt Preston and Reviewer

Ngon Ngon.
Ngon Ngon.Supplied

Vietnamese

Some would believe it an auspicious day to be visiting Ngon Ngon. Along one side of this comparatively new Sino-Viet arrival on Smith Street, a long table is set for the celebration of a baby's first month. It's like peeking through a crack in the curtain into an unfamiliar moment of everyday Melbourne life, and my own boisterous family group feels right at home.

Ngon Ngon itself is five months old. Its cafe interior is like many others: walls roughly rendered and painted in what the colour charts probably call "latte" and "buttercup". Dark-stained wooden tables and simple plywood chairs. Shelves lined with waving cats, backlit pictures and fake fish tanks full of brightly hued plastic fish that float up and down in a constant stream of bubbles.

On each table stands a pot of chopsticks, standard issue soy, a box of tissues and a vacuum flask of hot tea.

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The menu also has all the hallmarks of many Sino-Viet places around town: there are rice paper rolls and spring rolls. Rice comes "broken", or fried with egg, prawns and thin slices of both broccoli stalks and that porky candy Chinese sausage or, more unusually, with added salted fish and cubed chicken.

The Vietnamese dishes seem to have far more oomph than those from the north of the border. The combination of slivers of pork and chunks of spring roll on a bed of white vermicelli, shredded lettuce and mint is a meal in itself, covering all the major food groups bar "dessert". Although it does taste as though there's a fair whack of sugar in the fish sauce dressing.

It's a take on a modern Vietnamese classic, however, that is voted dish of the night across our generations. Granules of slightly sticky cooked garlic and chips of chilli are tossed through a pile of plump whitebait coated in an excellent dry batter. It's a great balance of flavour and execution; the garlic hasn't been cooked so it's bitter, just lightly carmelised.

It's certainly better than the prawns in garlic sauce with mange tout, capsicum and the florets from the head of that broccoli that comes with a slightly gluey sauce. A lean-to toilet block that backs on to a yard filled with scrap on our visit - a TV, an old meat slicer, rejected kitchen equipment - is an even less attractive side to the restaurant. Especially as the lavs are reached down a dingy staircase that corkscrews into the basement past padlocked storage areas. It feels as though you are walking into a scene from a Patricia Cornwell novel and makes a stark, and somewhat poignant, contrast to the joy upstairs as another new Australian is welcomed into our lives.

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