Into wild suburbs with Luke Nguyen and foodie chicks

Her insistence that Luke's recipe demanded only the freshest ingredients saw most of the $25 budget spent in less than a minute while fat bunches of herbs, bean sprouts, elephant ears, tamarind pulp, okra, garlic chips and fried sliced red Asian shallots remained to be bought from the grocer next door.

Sunday morning crowds, dense and heaving, surged around them, one or two gawkers occasionally stopping to stare, perplexed but amused by the exiles from the city's inner east and northern shores.

Nearly two dozen of them were trawling the noisy, crowded alleyways and market stalls guided by chef Luke Nguyen of The Red Lantern in Surrey Hills, or his mother and father, or uncle and auntie who materialized by the most curious happenstance at the very moment extra guides were needed to lead the small band of intrepid foodies through the wilds of Cabramatta on a Sunday morning.

Not that Cabramatta is really wild anymore, not like it had been the last time I visited over 12 years ago when the suburb was a major clearinghouse for the heroin trade between the inner city and the outer west.

In those days the open air mall in the village center and the streets around it were haunted by hollow faced junkies and the dealers who fed on them. A decade or so later all that seems to remain of that time are the faintest of memories and a persistent but undeserved reputation elsewhere in the city.

Luke Nguyen, who is so very obviously proud of his cosmopolitan hometown and his roots in the community there, still felt the need to assure the visitors on his Cabramatta Tour but it was all cool, they'd be safe, there was nothing to worry about while they were walking around visiting some of his favorite local spots.

He probably didn't need to. His personal tourists were all there by choice as part of the Sydney International Food Festival, and among the city's food lovers Cabramatta has long been known as something very special.

The local council, which spent millions of dollars and years of grief and toil dragging the suburb out of the tabloid headlines, needed something more than closed-circuit TVs and increased numbers of cops on the beat to turn the situation around.

In the neutron star dense cluster of cheap, bustling and amazingly varied Asian restaurants in Cabramatta's town center they had a start. In Luke Nguyen, however, they have somebody who can speak from the heart of of Cabra's vibrant but alien warren of alleyways, back streets and open air malls, buzzing and jangling with 90 different languages, and be heard, and more importantly listened to back in the city's east.

Back there in the old, established and immensely privileged and wealthy suburbs where Sydney's power elites rest at harbors edge or take their ease on the long golden line of beaches ribboning North and South of Manly and Bondi, Nguyen is well-known as chef-owner of one of the inner city's fave wok spots, and now as the frontman for his own food and travel series on SBS.

The two dozen punters who abandoned the A-list pleasures of the Food Festival's International Chef Showcase back at Darling Harbor came for Nguyen as much as for the adventure of culturally transplanting themselves thousands of miles with a 30 minute drive.

He proved himself as able a tour guide as he is a chef, leading a long snaking line of visitors and food bloggers through the same produce market which supplies his restaurant.

"This is some of the best fruit and vegetables you can find in Sydney," he said, holding up a mango and waving one hand at a virtual cliff face of bright green Asian herbs along one side of the shop.

"Your weekly vegetables back in Surrey Hills, your pay $100 for them. Out here they are much better and so much cheaper because there are dozens of little market gardens within a few minutes."

We visit a fishmonger with piles of fresh seafood heaped up on beds of ice. Glistening golden brown roast ducks hang in the window of his favorite barbecue joint. A fruit seller breaks up a jackfruit to pass around the curious and more intrepid of the group.

Away from the main mall with its tourist brochure iconography of stone dragons and painted wooden 'Chinatown' statuary Nguyen points to some of the remnants of previous waves of migrants who have passed through the area on their way up the city's social ladder.

Italians, Yugoslavs, Germans and Poles have all lived here in great numbers at one time or another, and a few still remain in the heart of the place, like Ljilja and Steva who arrived from somewhere east of the Iron Curtain to brew European style coffees 23 years ago.

Their old-fashioned, un-chromed espresso joint Cabra Coffee got Nguyen's nod as the joint to go if you were a displaced eastern suburbs foodie in need of a quick caffeine hit. Many of the other local cafés serve their brews in the Vietnamese style, with a big blob of condensed milk. Why?

"Most of us are lactose intolerant," smiled Nguyen in explanation.

Ten minutes into the ingredient hunt for the day's cooking class and my three displaced foodie chicks, Nicole Jacobson, Beverly Kaplan and Arlene Allardice looked like a could do with a soothing latte and a good sitdown. The insistence of Nguyen's auntie that an innocent perch must die on their say-so had them somewhat freaked out.

Die it did however, but at least it did so for a good cause. Their huge steaming bowl of silver perch and elephant ear stems in tamarind broth was a triumph, especially considering the circumstances under which it was prepared.

Hundreds of onlookers crowded around the big red tent where the food tourists gathered at five gas powered burners with the Nguyen family fussing over them and their bags of foraged market goods.

Slabs of cooked pork neck, bags of fresh prawns, pineapples coconuts and wobbling bricks of bean curd sat amongst forest of shallots, coriander, heads of garlic and gnarled orange knobs of ginger.

Pounding drums and clashing cymbals heralded the start of a dragon dance just a few metres away while the flashing sizzle of the woks seemed to encourage the hundreds of onlookers to start reaching in poking and touching and grabbing at ingredients, pointing at bowls where pork neck lay marinating, or at chopping boards on which cleavers reduced sheets of shallots to greenish-white mounds of stirfry fodder.

All was chaos and madness at the mob scene around the cooking class tents in the wall, affording me a chance to slip away and sample a flat white at Cabra Coffee; a fine heady brew it was too, with a nice caramelized depth of flavor that could put a few harborside barristas to shame.

A pork dumpling sourced from a hole in the wall a little further up the street was a revelation, a crisp light shell of beautifully crusted dough wrapped around the densest, meatiest gravy of minced pork, peas and sweet corn kernels.

It's a pity I ate two of them, along with a fluffy, heavy white bun, plump with chicken meat, and a foot long baton of golden deep-fried Vietnamese doughnut. It meant that when I returned to the class I had no tummy room for the sea perch, or weapons grade hot pork, the soft rice paper rolls or a perfectly balanced salad of crunchy anchovies, bright red chilies and mounds of crisp, chopped, mystery vegetables.

All of the dishes were better than just surprisingly good, they were great.

Nicole, Beverly and Arlene in particular distinguished themselves, I thought, with the tamarind fish. Like so many Vietnamese dishes it managed that magical balance of great delicacy and a sense of cleanliness on the palate, with a deep complex layering of flavors that invites contemplation as much as lightning fast spoon work to get in for your share before all of the other greedy, Outland, tourist bastards scarf it all up when you're not looking.

John Birmingham travelled to Sydney as a guest of Tourism New South Wales.

FAST FACTS

Luke Nguyen's tour of Cabramatta was conducted as part of the Sydney International Food Festival. Dates for additional tours are to be announced soon. Watch www.redlantern.com.au for details.

For a DIY tour, follow Luke Nguyen's Cabramatta picks

Cafe 86 (for Vietnamese hot or iced coffee)

4/29 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9723 2696

Minh Tam BBQ Pork (get their roast duck for an easy dinner)

6/29 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9726 7162

Pho Viet Restaurant (Pho Bo beef noodle soup)

11-15 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9728 6657

Bau Truong Restaurant (Goi Bo Bop Tha beef salad with green mango, apple and star fruit)

42 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9727 4492

Phuoc An Chinese Herbs (get fixed quick with natural remedies)

2/50 Park Road, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9728 2768

Thai Hung Asian Fruit Market

3-4/47 Park Road, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9728 2068

Tien Minh Bakery (Banh Mi Thit pork roll)

2/85 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9755 0656

Chi-Thanh 2 Butchery

11B/53 Park Road, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9724 3700

An Lac Vegan Restaurant (Bun Rieu Chay vegan vermicelli)

94B John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9727 5116

Tan Viet Noodle House (Mi Ga Don crispy skin chicken with egg noodle)

2-3/100 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9727 6853

Eastland Supermarket

103 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9726 9104

Viet Hoa Fish and Seafood Market

3/85 John Street, Cabramatta, Tel: +61 (02) 9725 6546