Steaming bowls of Pho soup, Pho An

The place is packed with locals and school kids sipping on coffee and tropical fruit smoothies.
The range available, listed on the bright lime green wall behind the counter, tells a story – choose from avocado, durian, coconut, mango, papaya, mungbean sour apple and strawberry and make your own combination.  Café Nho is Vietnamese and one of the latest additions to many good Vietnamese eateries in the area.
We’ve decided to try the gelato and order taro, durian and black sesame.  The taro, purple in colour, is unusual and delicious as is the black sesame.  I also like the durian despite its strong flavour.
Gelato on a cold winter’s day might sound a bit odd, but we’d lunched on big bowls of steaming Pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) at Pho An earlier and needed something sweet and light before setting out on the journey home.  While Café Nho is just 18 months old, Pho An has been operating 23 years and you’ll find locals in there at all hours of the day eating different varieties of Pho (rare beef, tripe, brisket, chicken with all the bits: heart, giblets, liver).  My rare beef version hits the spot – the thinly sliced beef cooking in the hot broth as I add accompaniments of chilli, fish sauce, bean sprouts and fresh herbs.  So nutritious and filling and just $12.
Since being proclaimed a city in 1980, Bankstown’s population has swollen to 180,000 and is a fascinating mix of Lebanese, Vietnamese, Greek and African
cultures.
The past 60 years have seen many changes. In the 1950s, it was a working class area with a large Greek population.  Peter and Maria Karpouzis, who emigrated from the Greek island of Lesbos in the mid 1950s, were just one of making home-made smallgoods.  In 1956, they opened the Olympic Deli & Butchery (named after the Olympics hosted in Melbourne that year), now famous for its range of home-made hams, smoked meats and sausages.  Don’t miss the Cypriot red wine sausages or the garlicky Mytilene pork and veal ones – fabulous!
Just up the road from Olympic Deli is John Lu’s Best Value Supermarket, an all-purpose Asian grocery store.  The ladies on the cash registers all speak English and the affable John likes to cook dumpling and buns on the weekend for shoppers to taste and buy.
Tucked away in an alley is Izvor Deli, which stocks deli favourites from Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Turkey and Greece.  People drive from all over Sydney to buy the home-made Macedonian sausages (available Tuesdays) and chevapi.  Make sure to taste the Ajva dip (roasted eggplant and red capsicum) and take a jar home with you.
Along the Appian Way is the Valley View Continental Grocery.  When I stepped in here, I felt I was back in the spice bazaar in Istanbul.  Scores of colourful spices piled pyramid style delight the eye and fill the air with fragrance.  Cumin, coriander, chilli, caraway, cloves and anise are some of the more common ones, but you’ll also find more unusual ones such as mansef (for flavouring lamb and rice), felafel, sumac, zaatar and shawarma (a rub for beef and lamb).
And you won’t want to miss the heavenly pastries at Chehade El Bahsa & Sons, one of Sydney’s legendary Lebanese pastry shops.  Go on a Saturday and all sorts of delights will emerge from the kitchen, including a melt-in-the-mouth‘Ladies Arm’ (znoued el sit) which is filled with clotted cream (ashta) and the house specialty, a type of Turkish Delight, which they call ‘Lebanese Delight’ (halwet el chmasie), made with rice, filled with clotted cream and topped with icing sugar and pistachios. Delightful.

TIP:  If it’s your first time to Bankstown, don’t confuse  Bankstown City Plaza with Centro Shopping, which is just a replication of any other shopping mall in Sydney.

Bankstown Bites Food Festival Saturday July 31, 2010, 10am – 4pm: food tours depart from the front of Bankstown Railway Station at 10.30am, 12.30pm and 2.30pm.