The Best Pho in Melbourne is From a Vietnamese Restaurant That ‘Opens When We Feel Like It’

LAND BACK NOW BINCH. Scrawled in red spray paint above the restaurant’s roller door, the slogan, followed by a crudely sketched Palestinian flag, is one of the first things you notice about Shop Bao Ngọc. Then the community fridge catches your eye, emblazoned with “FREE” in big, pink capitals, above another Palestinian flag.

Garnishing a windy stretch of Victoria Street, in Melbourne’s Brunswick, Shop Bao Ngọc’s exterior encapsulates the anti-capitalist, de-colonial, pro-community principles of both the former restaurant and its owner, Ngọc Trân. 

Ngọc Trân is fucking cool. She’s someone who genuinely backs her principles through action, and uses her restaurant and her platform to do so. 

The principles: Fuck capitalism, land back, support migrant-owned business, shop local, hospitality is gnarly, pay as you can, community is everything. 

On any given night, Shop Bao Ngọc could hold a fundraising event, Pho Night [payment from $15-$30 on a sliding scale, no one will be turned away for lack of funds], an amulet workshop, or a queer community BBQ.

Once, it was a full-time restaurant. Now, it’s “open when we feel like it”.

“People think it’s a laziness thing,” Trân told VICE when we met at the shop for our interview, to take place while she prepped two huge vats of Pho Night broth. “I literally work two other jobs. Burnout is real.”

Trân initially opened the restaurant in 2018 with the honourable dream to bring people together through food and to give back to her community. But within a year she felt it had become less give, all take. Trân was working 15-plus-hour days – closing up sometimes past midnight, dishevelled, exhausted, sleeping on the ground in the back on rolled out garbage bags.

Why go home to bed when you have to be back at 5 to start the broth, anyway?

Deciding to close the shop full-time, Trân was able to attempt to recuperate, re-resource, and repurpose it towards what she’d always hoped it would be: a community hub.

“I have better boundaries now,” she laughed.

Closing the restaurant was radical. Deciding to open based on their whim was even more so. But Trân isn’t a stranger to questioning the status quo.

In 2020 she went viral in the inner-north hospitality community for calling out white-majority customers for bitching about their bánh mi prices. 

“Why is cheap food a prerequisite characteristic for ‘authentic’ Asian restaurants?” Trân wrote on an Instagram post.

“You would happily spend $$$$ at a non-POC owned ‘Asian fusion’ joint, calling their food ‘innovative’, yet you think it’s your right to lash out when a first gen immigrant owned restaurant has decided to put prices up because produce is getting more expensive.”

Unafraid to call out the dissonance of white Australians and the everyday, almost prosaic racism that thrums below smiling exteriors, Trân is a beloved local icon. 

From fostering mutual aid – keeping the “take what you need” fridge stocked, making bulk meals for people in need during lockdowns – lending out Shop Bao Ngọc for all sorts of events, or even just in being a leader, Trân is someone who advocates for her values and finds a way to make it work and to help others make it work in spite of capitalism. 

The world would be a better place with more people like Trân in it. And that’s not even to mention the perfect… perfect pho.

Arielle Richards is the multimedia reporter at VICE Australia, follow her on Instagram and TikTok.