Hawker Canteen — Restaurant in Melbourne

Dropped by around 11 a.m. as the staff were setting up. The place is clean, modern, and feels designed for the office crowd nearby.

The staff were friendly overall. Initially, there was a bit of delay, but the girl who ended up taking my order was super warm and smiling. I ordered the Crackling Pork Bánh Mì, and she clarified that it is called the Roast Pork with Crackling Baguette on their menu.

The sandwich itself felt lighter than what I am used to, but the meat filling looked generous when she prepared it. Unfortunately, I really did not enjoy the bread. They use a tiger bread-style baguette, which had a burnt taste and lacked the structure to hold everything together. The bread started falling apart like a soft burger bun, which made it hard to enjoy—especially as a takeaway lunch.

For $12, it is decently priced considering the location (just a few buildings down from the U.S. Embassy). But if you are after a classic Vietnamese bánh mì with authentic flavour and texture, this is not quite it. This is more of a modern, Asian-inspired lunch bar than a traditional...

Authentic, cheap, large portions all served on beautiful crockery - what more can you ask for?

The pork and prawn dry noodles comes with rice or egg noodle and was only $9.9! Pork belly slices were succulent, noodles were bouncy, sauce was savoury, all garnished with coriander and spring onions.

3 seafood spring rolls were only $3.3

My only complaint is that it's TOO cheap. $9.9 for a bowl of noodles AND soup - what is this 2001? lol

Quick note - maybe try using reusable plastic chopsticks for dine in customers, seeing as you have to wash the spoons and...

I suspect this place has gone downhill since it changed hands. Bought take away rice paper rolls which were fairly tasteless and one had a hard lump of chicken in it. Relatively expensive too at around $3.60 per roll. BBQ pork baguette was extremely disappointing with lumps of congealed fat! Disgusting. Roll was soft and not crunchy. Won't be going back. The service was also not up to scratch - staff seemed unsure of what they were doing and were asking each other how to...