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Westside Acton Park: Birth of a trendy new street-food venue in Canberra?

Natasha Rudra

The vista from The Aviary Bar and the Courtside Bar run by Alex Heslop.
The vista from The Aviary Bar and the Courtside Bar run by Alex Heslop.Matt Bedford

COMMENT

It was a sunny wintry day when I headed down to the Westside shipping container village to check out the food vendors that had just opened their doors on the old futsal slab. Workmen were still putting up clear plastic screens to shield the rooftop bar from a chilly wind that swept in off the lake. The view was lovely.

Tom Luxton and Chris Allan's fare from The One Food Van.
Tom Luxton and Chris Allan's fare from The One Food Van.Matt Bedford
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On the ground, a young couple bounced a basketball around on the slab, taking turns to shoot against each other. I drank a tamarind soft drink at Walid Ajaje's Lebanese street food kiosk. Talked to a bunch of people who were young, enthusiastic, and keen to make something different happen in Canberra's food scene.

A couple of hours later we found out that the project had been raised in Senate estimates, described disparagingly by a senator (who doesn't live in Canberra and doesn't represent its people) as being like a detention centre. Or a golf driving range. From his comments, it sounded like he'd never even been to the village, just been driven past it in his Comcar on the way to and from parly.

But let's talk about what's actually inside the shipping containers. They're essentially food vans (because, let's face it, there are no actual roving food vans in this town. Have you seen that movie Chef, about the guy who road trips with his son across the US selling Cubanos at every stop? It's not like that at all.)

Spicy solution: Andrew Duong of Miss Van's.
Spicy solution: Andrew Duong of Miss Van's.Matt Bedford

Canberra's budding street culture has an appetite and the container village foodies and their counterparts on Lonsdale Street at The Hamlet are catering to it.

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Street culture requires people on the street, people who are happy to slurp down a bowl of beef noodles with the hoods of their jackets pulled up to keep out that icy Canberra chill, people who take the time to wander out on a Wednesday night to catch up with friends over a drink at the rooftop bar, people who will come out and eat late into the night. The street food cultures of Asia are fuelled by a culture of people who want to eat out and who will walk their talk, not just show up on Friday and Saturday nights from 6.30-8.30pm.

Let's also acknowledge the original food vans in Canberra - RJ's in Woden, long the haunt of many a graveyard shift taxi driver or, as The Canberra Times reported in 2014, the gathering point for young car enthusiasts. The G Spot in Gungahlin, which has been serving northsiders for years and has a loyal following. The family enterprise that is the Mandalay bus, where George Kyaw Thaung kept a gun under the counter in case of trouble and doled out Burmese curries for 20 years until he was bashed at Summernats in the 1990s. His son Stewart has reopened the bus and caters to the young late night Braddon crowd instead. In more recent years Brodburger made a tiny lakeside carpark a go-to spot for burgers and fries.

Canberra's starting to build its own, unique street food culture. It will have its own, unique challenges - perhaps things like the weather, red tape, our scattered urban geography, bad instagram filters. Let's hope it grows, and let's help it grow. And whatever it grows into will be distinctly Canberran, shaped by events, circumstances and people who are Canberran, not senators from a faraway state.

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Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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