Page 25 - Food Service Magazine March 2019

DINING
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D. D.
“There’s a bit of the, ‘your banh mi is expensive, I can get one for $5 down the road.’ But I just school them in ingredients, like free range chicken-liver pate, and all the things we do to make it taste this good. In the end, they’re always won over.”
scratch with a hard-cooked rice from the Northern Territory, which we soak and then blend with mung beans, turmeric and organic coconut milk,” he says. “It was the version we were happy to stand behind and it just so happened to tick those boxes.” The Paddington crowd ate it up.
After they settled in, business was booming and the couple were in it full-time. The only downside of the movable feast was no permanent storage space. “We were doing all the prep out of our small apartment and there were fridges everywhere. Our home changed – we even got inspected by health and safety department,” says Sinfield.
They started receiving an uncountable number of emails gauging their interest in a bricks-and-mortar space, among which was the Cannery.
Catching the eyes of big-league enterprises is a testament to their product and operation, but Ho says they barely had time to step back and take it all in. They hadn’t planned for this and had to make a quick decision. “We weren’t sure on the space – the whole venue was a bit empty – but the clincher was existing fixtures in the kitchen and no other Asian in the centre.” A blitz renovation and two weeks later, they were open.
They initially planned to use the space as a base for their market operation, “but we only made it back three times. This just took over,” says Sinfield.
It’s hard to pin down what ‘this’ is in the bustling Banh Xeo Bar. It has fast-casual elements and a thriving takeaway lunch trade, but you can also sit down and dine on crumbed pig's head nuggets, beef tongue pancakes, and roasted bone marrow with lemongrass and chilli. All in all, Banh Xeo Bar is accessible and streamlined, but also unaffected and gloriously different.
So do they suffer the ‘authentic’ scourge? “There’s a bit of the, ‘your banh mi is expensive, I can get one for $5 down the road’,” says Ho, but “I just school them in ingredients, like free range chicken-liver pate, and all the things we do to make it taste this good. In the end, they’re always won over.” Naturally, Ho takes particular pleasure with Vietnamese customers. “They all say it’s the best pancake they’ve ever had,” she says.
Now they're just over one year in, and they say business is better than they ever imagined. “It’s a lot of work and Ben has been approached by great restaurants, but for us [this] is much more rewarding,” says Ho.
For self-described business newbies, they’re navigating new waters with skill – the words 'expansion' and 'franchising' have popped up
a few times. Now they’re taking the time to find their feet before
the next step. If history repeats, they’ll do something refreshingly unexpected. Stay tuned.