Coming Soon: Good Days Is Opening a Banh Mi Shop, Good Days Hot Bread, on Sydney Road

Following the closure of its south-side sibling Good Nights, Brunswick’s Good Days is set to bolster its presence on Sydney Road come May with a new banh mi shop opening in the former Bar Texaco site.

Called Good Days Hot Bread, owner Nam Nguyen describes it as a riff on Australian-Vietnamese bakeries. “It’s a play on all the hot bread bakeries in Australia, so it’s more an interpretation of a Vietnamese-Australian bakery rather than trying to be a traditional Vietnamese bakery or authentic banh mi from Hoi An,” says Nguyen.

“We’re going to do little pastries and stuff as well. Because a lot of those Vietnamese hot bread proprietors took over a lot of Australian bakeries in the ’80s and ’90s, so they were selling pies and pastries and doughnuts and finger buns … and then they started doing banh mi on top of it.”

While you won’t find doughnuts or finger buns here, you will find house-made pastries like pate chaud (Vietnamese meat pies with flaky puff pastry), eclairs filled with pandan-coconut cream and Vietnamese coffee cream, and Laughing Cow cheesecake.

As for those banh mis: the Good Days crew started selling the crusty baguettes during lockdown, often selling out via online orders before the doors even opened.

The most popular will appear on the Hot Bread menu, including xiu mai (Vietnamese pork meatballs in tomato sauce), a vegan roasted cauliflower one and char siu lamb. But the star is set to be a new creation: Black Angus brisket and rare beef banh mi dipped in a rich pho broth – a play on the French dip sandwich.

Drinks are likely to include Vietnamese coffee, iced tea, custard apple smoothies and tepache (a Mexican fermented pineapple drink).

Good Days Hot Bread will open at 644 Sydney Road, Brunswick in May.

@gooddays_brunswick