Brisbane’s tiny Vietnamese restaurant with a cult following

Reserved for those in the know, this small suburban Vietnamese restaurant has reached insane popularity with customers swarming for a table.

We’re at the no-frills Warrigal Square Shopping Centre in Eight Mile Plains, in Brisbane’s south. There’s a run of eateries facing out to a carpark, and outside one of them a large crowd swarms.

Women, men, children ... they all line the footpath, inadvertently blocking people from walking past, and spilling out among the cars.

The hungry horde is queuing for Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine, a tiny, pared-back eatery decorated with framed artworks of Vietnamese landscapes and filled with tables and chairs crammed in tighter than boats in Ha Long Bay in peak season.

Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine in Eight Mile Plains.

After a short wait, a waitress pokes her head out the restaurant’s front door and signals to us a table is ready.

We appear to be the only two non-Vietnamese diners in the venue of about 50 seats, with families and friends slurping down giant bowls of pho and tucking into plates of crispy-skin chicken and deep-fried squid all around us.

The vibe is like that of a Vietnamese street food market, with the jovial crowd wedged in shoulder to shoulder, connecting over food and flavour. And boy is there some serious flavour going on here. The menu is a substantial one. It meanders from entrees like the aforementioned crispy-skin chicken to wonton soup, before moving into their signature rice paper rolls, continuing on to pho, salads, noodles soups, ho fun and a multitude of rice dishes.

Beef brisket with rice noodle soup at Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine in Eight Mile Plains.

While pho is no doubt the biggest seller here, we’re after something richer, and the chestnut-hued French-style beef brisket rice noodle soup ($17.90) influenced by Vietnam’s French colonialism era screams to be ordered. Arriving steaming hot and loaded with chunks of carrot, daikon, pak choi and effortlessly tender beef, plus tangles of perfectly soft thin rice noodles, this is delicate yet punchy, light yet filling, and pure winter comfort in a bowl. If I lived closer, I might be here every day.

The hu tieu xao do bien ($18.90) – also known as stir-fried ho fun noodles and seafood – is another exercise in balance. Slippery, fat rice noodles, prawns, squid and fried egg are deftly coated in oyster, soy and fish sauces which provide flavour but do not overwhelm the ingredients.

The hu tieu xao do bien at Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine in Eight Mile Plains.

And, of course, there’s the eatery’s eponymous dish, rice paper rolls, with our grilled pork version ($12.90) a seriously delicious incarnation packed with an abundance of marinated meat, plus vermicelli noodles, cucumber, carrot and herbs. The whole thing is only made better with a swipe through the venue’s peanut-infused hoisin sauce blend.

There is no liquor license here, but a long list of cold drinks like iced lemon tea, iced coffee and a three-colour bean drink loaded with jelly, red beans and coconut that could double as dessert and is just as difficult to put down.

Grilled pork rice paper rolls at Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine in Eight Mile Plains.

There’s nothing like a crowd amassed outside an eatery to get me excited. That excitement only accelerates when the eatery is seemingly unpretentious and in a rather unusual or non-traditional location.

Why? Because you know people aren’t there because of the flashy fit-out or because it’s the “place to be”. They are there for the damn good food. And that’s certainly the case at Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine.

Rice Paper Vietnamese Cuisine

Warrigal Square Shopping Centre, 261 Warrigal Rd, Eight Mile Plains

3219 9668

Open

Daily 11am-9pm

Verdict - Scores out of 5

Food 4

Service 3

Ambience 3

Value 4

Overall 3.5