Van Mai Vietnamese Restaurant.

Van Mai Vietnamese Restaurant

The family who run it put the reason on their own About page: the restaurant is "a reminder of our heritage, but a way to give back to a country that has been so generous to our family."

Why go

Because it is a Le family dining room on Victoria Street and has been for more than thirty years, and because the cooking has a region attached to it. The venue describes its menu as inspired by the cuisine of the Mekong Delta region in Southern Vietnam (Van Mai), and the menu backs the claim up in the one way that counts: the noodle-soup section is headed Hu Tieu and Mi, the Delta's soups, rather than pho. Pho is northern and it colonised almost every Vietnamese menu in Australia, so a kitchen leading with hu tieu is telling you where its cooks are from. Beyond that, the record is empty, and the entry says so below rather than dressing it up.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the hu tieu with wonton and barbecue pork, or the roast duck version, which is the one dish on the published list priced above the rest. A rare beef salad, because the salads carry their own section and southern cooking lives at that herby end.
• Avoid: Mondays and Tuesdays, when it is shut, and Wednesday lunch, since Wednesday is dinner only.

What locals & experts say

Nothing. That is the finding, and here is the shape of it.

• Time Out Melbourne picked twenty Melbourne Vietnamese restaurants in October 2024. Nine are in Richmond, several on this street: Anchovy, Thy Thy Counter and Canteen, Rue de Tanh, I Love Pho, Thanh Hà 2, Co Do, Ca Com, New Quarter, Co Thu Quan. Van Mai is not among them.2
• Broadsheet's pho guide lists seven rooms and none is this one.3
• The hardest null is a chef's. Thi Le, chef-owner of Anchovy, gave Gourmet Traveller her Melbourne picks and two of them are on this block: Phước Thành Bakery at 206 Victoria Street, where Family-operated Phước Thành Bakery on Victoria Street does the best bread in Victoria, and Thanh Hà 2 at 120, where The chef is the only one allowed to make the batter and she won't share the recipe. She walked past 372.4
• Forty-four Melbourne chefs have made 74 picks in this project's corpus. None is Van Mai.
• So this is a local room, not a hidden one. Victoria Street is among the densest Vietnamese strips outside Vietnam and Melbourne's food press covers it closely. Silence on a street this well lit means something different from silence in a suburb nobody writes about.

Good to know

• Where: 372-374 Victoria Street, Richmond, the Little Saigon end.
• Timing: Wednesday 5pm to 9.30pm; Thursday to Sunday 11am to 9.30pm; closed Monday and Tuesday.
• Booking: the restaurant takes bookings and catering; delivery runs at $5 to Richmond, Abbotsford, Burnley, Cremorne, Hawthorn, Kew, Collingwood and East Melbourne.
• What could not be read: the full menu sits behind an ordering widget that neither fetch route would return, so nine dishes are all that is established. Whether pho and banh xeo are served is unresolved.
• Where the street's press sends people instead: Phước Thành Bakery at 206 for banh mi, Thanh Hà 2 at 120 for banh xeo, I Love Pho for the pho.
• Safety: Victoria publishes no venue ratings, only Safe Food Victoria's register of convictions under s.53D of the Food Act 1984, and this venue is not on it. Market Bar Richmond at 3/228 Victoria Street is on it, and that is a different business at a different address.7

Verdict

listed — The Le family have run this room on Victoria Street for over thirty years and they write about it as a debt: 'a reminder of our heritage, but a way to give back to a country that has been so generous to our family.' The cooking they claim is Mekong Delta, southern Vietnamese, and the menu they publish backs that up. The section is headed Hu Tieu and Mi, the Delta's noodle soups, not pho, which is a northern dish that took over every Vietnamese menu in Australia. That distinction is the most interesting thing on the record here. What is not on the record is anyone's opinion. Time Out picked twenty Melbourne Vietnamese restaurants in 2024 and nine of them are in Richmond and this is not one. Broadsheet's pho guide leaves it out. Thi Le of Anchovy named two places on this same block for Gourmet Traveller, at numbers 206 and 120, and did not name 372. Forty-four Melbourne chefs made 74 picks between them and none is this. Victoria Street is one of the densest Vietnamese strips outside Vietnam and it is well covered, so silence here reads as a local room rather than a missed one. It stays listed until somebody eats a bowl and reports.