‘It’s my soul’: This Vietnamese spot engages the senses in ways few Sydney restaurants do

Chicken rules menus and makes the world turn. Think about the impossible crunch of Korean fried chicken, the interdimensional fire and spice of Nashville hot chicken, the char and smoke of spice-rubbed chooks spun over charcoal, the crust and juice of a brined schnitzel.

A single chicken dish can drive multinationals, spark huge corporate deals, turn little-known restaurants into cult classics. Hai Au Lang Nuong has one such dish, its ga nuong xoi nep. It’s an organic bird, spatchcocked and wrapped in banana leaves then turned slowly, rotisserie-style, over the steady heat of mangrove charcoal until its skin goes from pale to gold.

Jointed, it lands on a plate alongside a clump of sticky rice that tempers the sweetness and the gentle salt-fermented punch of a sugar and fish sauce marinade. Two pots of sauce – a sweet chilli, and a shock-green with floral makrut-lime kick – round out the edges and add exclamation marks.

For many other restaurants, this dish plus a couple of extras, would be enough to guarantee steady trade. At Hai Au Lang Nuong, it’s barely the beginning. On weekends, families, friends – many living locally in Sydney’s Vietnamese heartland, many making a pilgrimage – flood the tables and the footpath on Canley Vale’s main drag.

Inside or out, they’re clinking Coronas, loading tables with pipis and periwinkles popped open over charcoal, and swishing silver perch from the live tanks through sweet-sour soup until its flesh falls into flakes.

Unfold the menu and the number of dishes, including the section of “hot dishes for hot customers to enjoy”, is pushing 100. There’s the promise of subtlety and sharpness in rock oysters sauced with lemon-pickle verde. Of varying levels of crunch in a salad of pig’s ear, prawn and pickled palm hearts.

Fiery, fragrant, fresh and textural, eating at Hai Au Lang Nuong engages the senses in ways few restaurants manage. But the most remarkable aspect of this street-food specialist isn’t what’s coming off the grill, it’s the space itself, and its ever-present owner, Ben Nguyen, who over a quarter of a century has poured every ounce of his personality into the corner site.

On the street front? The awning, decorated with faux flowers, reeds, brushes and shrubs, glows neon. Rows of “non la”, Vietnam’s conical hats, are fashioned into lanterns. Rickshaws are converted into shrines. A handful of street-side seats offer sightlines to chefs working the beds of coal. Hear that sweet-sounding voice? That’s Nguyen’s friend, perched on a stool with a Stratocaster, belting out Vietnamese crooners.

Nguyen is so invested in the suburb and its nightlife scene, he has even supported a campaign to form “Little Asia”, a district that’s seen as Sydney’s go-to spot at night for south-east Asian culture, art, and food.

Inside the venue, Nguyen occupies a booth reserved for the boss, while the front counter and kitchen call to each other in Vietnamese over the PA. Walls, ceilings, railings, all of it, is plastered with paraphernalia. Here are backlit jars filled with submerged shells and starfish. There are cracked claypots fashioned into art pieces. Here’s a life-sized statue of a water buffalo. Poetry, Star Wars memorabilia, family photos referencing a time before the Nguyens came to Australia as refugees, seated Buddhas, cherubs praying, it’s all here. “It’s my soul,” Nguyen says, and in them there’s the very real sense that what’s considered waste in one pair of hands can, in someone else’s, find new meaning.

Among the chaos, the food is an anchor. The periwinkles are offered in coconut cream or tamarind sauces, but ordering them simply grilled and scented with lemongrass gives the most space to experience their richness. Skewer them, uncoil them from their spiral shells, dip, eat and repeat. Bo la lop nuong than, centred around a platter of minced beef wrapped in betel leaves and grilled, is one of many tactile menu items, the table set with rice paper wrappers, herbs, vermicelli and sauces.

At the end of last year, a press release for a new restaurant in Canley Vale landed in the Good Food inbox. It boasted a multimillion-dollar fitout, marble accents and dishes ranging from Blackmore wagyu to olive oil-poached spanner crab with dashi cream. It’s ambitious for the area, recognising its growth, and probably an important addition to the suburb. But we’ve seen this fitout, heard these stories. Hai Au is the opposite. This is one man’s unique interpretation of what a restaurant can be, driven by family, movement and memory.

The last time I went back, I took a friend. We ordered the steamboat and the kitchen scaled it down for us. The waiter turned on the gas, dropped off ramekins of lemongrass-flecked fish sauce. We let the soup, tinted red and thick with herbs, come up to a simmer, dropped in bean sprouts, water spinach and fish, let it cook, then spooned it out into our bowls. My friend thought about it for a second, then took a bite. “My mum made this dish,” she said. “Just not as good.”

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.