One Year In, a Riverwood Banh Mi Shop Is Considered One of the City’s Best (Including by a Top Chef)

Just before noon on a Thursday, a crowd swells on Belmore Road in Riverwood. Newcomers and regulars chatter over Bae Mi’s menu and hot bar as orders fly. You’d expect a wait, but the line whizzes – everything moving quickly thanks to Lynda Tran’s slick systems.

“Our first month, we sold out every single day,” Tran says. A once-dead strip became electric, and she quickly found herself pulling up to 15-hour days driven by her bestselling crackling pork banh mi. “We were going through about 100 kilos of pork a day – the cleaning, the prep, the drying. It was crazy, so we had to close down.”

Post-reno, which maxxed out the storage and added room for the bread process, the kitchen went from struggling with 100 customers a day to cruising when it hits 500, which is regularly.

Everything but the traditional cold-cuts are made in-house, with meat cooking consistently throughout the day to keep things fresh. “We’re doing all the elements of a banh mi, but want to do everything right,” says Tran.

It starts with her bread: baked fresh all day, soft and airy inside, crisp outside, but not built to shatter. It took months to nail, honed through sharp customer feedback. Then comes the pile on: smears of chicken liver pâté – milk-soaked then double-baked – join a rich Vietnamese mayo made with whole eggs. Onion four ways: fresh shallots, shallot oil, thin-sliced Spanish onions and fried onions. Freshly pickled carrots and radish for supreme crunch.

Then your choice of protein from the 12-part menu. Take the signature Bae Mi Special: cold-cuts meet caramelised pork – slow-cooked for six hours with fish sauce, soy, and a hit of herbs and spices – and a blizzard of crackling. It’s excessive, hedonistic even. There’s a Korean-inspired fried chicken roll, too, crunchier and punchier than the usual chook.

The additional specials are a bit more offbeat – like the butter chicken roll that hit so hard it ran an extra fortnight. “That’s the fun part,” says Tran. “It might work, it might not.”

Drinks lean into the playfulness, too: Vietnamese salted coffee, duo-toned strawberry matcha, fluffy taro clouds, pandan Vietnamese coffee, plus a line-up of fresh smoothies.

Before Bae Mi, Tran ran a catering and dessert business for 10 years with a loyal following. But with two young sons, the weekend work became untenable. She hit pause, reset and rebuilt around her bestselling banh mi – with an eye to creating something her boys could one day take on.

Six months in, customers were already stacking Bae Mi against heavyweights like Top Ryde Baker’s House and Marrickville Pork Roll. Now, a year in, King Clarence executive chef Khanh Nguyen, counts himself a fan. “My top three pork rolls in Sydney are Marrickville Pork Roll, Phuong 18 in Bankstown, and a newcomer called Bae Mi in Riverwood,” he told Broadsheet in March.

“When we opened, we didn’t want to be known as a cheap eat,” says Tran. “We want to be known for fresh, quality banh mi, with meat and bread cooked throughout the day.”

Bae Mi
282 Belmore Road, Riverwood

Hours:
Mon to Fri 9am–5pm
Sat 9am–4pm

@baemisydney