Cabramatta is just an hour by train or car from the Sydney CBD.  You’ll notice the difference as soon as you arrive: fresh lively smells of Vietnamese hot mint, coriander and perilla intermingle with rank durian, fish mint and fermented fish and the spicy smells of curry leaf, cinnamon and star anise; tiny altars set in walls filled with incense sticks and offerings to the Buddha; Pho noodle restaurants packed at 10.30am, and women butchers busy chopping up joints at Lucky Butchery.

Food snacks at Hung Vuong, John Street

It’s a world away from the bland shopping malls of most Sydney suburbs. Compared with a decade ago, most of the shopkeepers now speak English while many of the younger people have left to set up restaurants in the city – or become TV celebrity chefs like Luke Nguyen of Red Lantern.

Many of the restaurants have also become more up-market, and expensive, as you’ll discover at Bau Truong in John Street.  Ten years ago, this swish restaurant was located in a nearby arcade and you can see from the style and presentation of dishes such as the delicious beef in wild pepper leaf rolls and the pyramid-mounded beef salad with starfruit, just how contemporary it has become.

One of my favourite traditional Vietnamese dishes is Pho, an aromatic beef and rice noodle soup, which you’ll find at the well-known Pho 54 and also at Pho Tau Bay and Pho Viet, but for a quick snack while on your stall-crawl, I recommend the pork and prawn pancakes from Hung Vuong, also in John Street, or a ‘banh mi’ (pork and salad roll) from one of the stalls further up. A legacy of French colonialism in Indochina, ‘banh mi’ combines French ingredients such as baguette, pate and mayonnaise with the Vietnamese ingredients of coriander, chillies, fish sauce, pickled carrots and pork ears.

As you’ll discover, food easily crosses borders and ignores politics, something which becomes readily apparent when visiting Cabramatta (and other Asian hot pots around Sydney).