Imagine every Pinterest board you've made. Every nicely styled page on Temple and Webster coming to life. That's what you'll find at this new high-design Vietnamese cafe. Whoever took a visit to Design Twins (the St Peters interiors store that's pretty much nectar to the upwardly mobile) had a field day buying up their beautiful geometrical plant pots, and those inexplicably expensive paper Uashmama bags (so many uses!). 

Take all that pale Danish wood, all that felt, the odd tasteful bit of neon, and a few felt pin boards (oh say, is that a coconut, pineapple and lychee slushie served in a Mason jar?). None of it's out of place on Danks Street any more. 

It's gone from industrial dead-zone to design hub.

While it's always a risk taking something like Vietnamese street food (they have a walk-by banh mi bar out the front for spicy pork rolls on the go) and placing it in a setting that might be more at home in Kinfolk magazine, the So 9 team have made it work.

Sugarcane prawns are super sweet and meaty, swaddled in fresh rice-paper sheets and packed with herbs. Steamed rice rolls are filled with highly seasoned minced pork and chopped up mushroom. They're surrounded by a coronet of thin slices of silken pork sausage – think of it as something like Vietnam's answer to mortadella. The whole thing is then covered in a thicket of pickled vegetables and herbs.

Banh xeo – a surfboard-sized Vietnamese crepe filled with pork and prawn served with frills of lettuce – is thin and crisp with beautiful lattice work on the crepe but also seems quite greasy. For us, it's all about the vermicelli rice salad bedazzled with fingers of fragrant beef mince wrapped in grilled betel leaves. Add all the usual suspects (pickled carrot, lettuce, mint, peanuts, nuoc cham dressing) and it's on par with anything you'll find in Haymarket.

It'd be a stretch to say it's Canley Vale-or-Cabramatta-worthy, but it's a bit of a find for the area.

Same with the pho.

They use good quality beef here, and those big rare slices are nice and juicy in a light but flavoursome broth that make friends with slippery rice noodles and a mass of Vietnamese basil. The quality of ingredients is amped, but you might not necessarily experience that real depth of flavour you get somewhere like Cabramatta's Pho An.    

But here's the thing. The better part of this equation is the fact the food is actively pretty good. And if aesthetics are as important to you as tastiness, this is your Waterloo.

Pro tip Lunching on the run? Drop past the banh mi bar out the front

Try this The vermicelli rice salad with grilled beef wrapped in betel leaves is a winner