The crunchy $7 snack you must try at Bia Hoi Bar
There are many great reasons to visit the indoor-outdoor dining precinct at The Glen shopping centre, but this crunchy $7 bar snack served at Vietnamese restaurant Bia Hoi is definitely the best — and has beer written all over it.
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“Mot, Hai, Ba — Yo!”
Jerry Mai — the chef whose mohawk is eclipsed only by the size of her grin — is teaching our table how to toast in Vietnamese.
Translating as “1, 2, 3, cheers!” Jerry is doing her best to show Glen Waverley how to drink just as they do in Hanoi at her new beer hall named after the fresh and foamy draught brew usually drunk on the streets of northern Vietnam.
Part of the huge indoor-outdoor dining precinct at the very swish new The Glen shopping centre, Bia Hoi is Mai’s first restaurant outside the CBD (she’s also behind Annam and Pho Nom) and joins a raft of eateries that includes cult ramen joint Shujinko, the great cook-to-order butchery Macelleria and the first Australian outpost of Korean restaurant Masizzim.
Just a few weeks in and Bia Hoi is buzzing.
This night there’s a band of bearded boys who have ditched their high-viz vests for Friday night flannel and are getting happily into Happy Hour beers around the bar while the dining room is full of families getting stuck into steamboats and steamed bao, skewers and spring rolls and slurping down pho.
It’s a good looking, simple space that cleverly channels Vietnam with its paper lanterns and colourful shutters and living greenery without resorting to cliches, and outdoor seating will be surely coveted come daylight saving where 3-litre beer towers will get the party started.
On tap the Bia Hoi lager — currently from Hawkers in Reservoir, $7 pot/$11 schooner — is joined by a pale ale from Burnley Brewing and a sunset ale from Spotswood’s Two Birds (both $8/$12), while the fridge is filled with a cool curation of local crafties (La Sirene, Sailors Grave, Boatrocker) and Vietnamese tinnies (333, Bia Hanoi).
There’s enough beer hall interest, with $9 Saigon Specials for those who just want to smash a thirst.
Fresh and fruity cocktails that make the most of the kitchen’s ginger, lemongrass and lime are at prices you’d never see in the city ($15-$18).
The tight Aussie wine list of just 10 whites and reds is filled with spice-friendly, off-centre varietals (fiano, gewurztraminer) and bright, juicy reds from a roll call of on-trend producers (Billy Button, Avani, SC Pannell, Cloak & Dagger).
It’s a terrific, fairly priced list as at home in an inner-city wine bar as this suburban beer hall.
But there’s one snack here that has beer written all over it — crispy chicken skin.
Tossed through wok-fried chillies and garlic, these tiles of crunchy fried chicken skin are every bit as good as you’d imagine crunchy fried chicken skin to be: fatty and salty and roast chicken-y, it’s like a bowl of pope’s nose dreams amped with grab-another-beer heat ($7).
The green chilli dusted pork puffs ($6) pale somewhat in comparison, though make equally fine friends with that bia hoi.
More chicken, this time in fried form, keeps the easy pleasing good times rolling.
Jerry Fried Chicken is a plate of gnarly battered ribs with peppery crunch, the slide-from-the-bone meat coming with either a light fish sauce caramel or a lurid red chilli sauce that’s not as “fire hot” as billed but tastily spicy nonetheless ($14/$20).
But the small plate of the night goes to the pancakes known as banh xeo.
Filled with prawn, pork and served with a paddy full of herbs, the turmeric-stained pancakes are a deliciously crisp delight ($18).
We’re sitting on one of a handful of BBQ tables, and while going out to dinner to cook it yourself isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, DIY interactivity offers a whole lot of family fun.
For $40 a head you’ll get a feast of meat and seafood that might include fabulously marbled wagyu sirloin, tender-rich beef intercostals (the meat between the ribs) and marinated chicken as well as calamari and swimmer crab claws and butter-topped scallops in their shell.
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You’ll get sheaths of rice paper and chewy bun hoi vermicelli noodles and more herbs to wrap and roll and dunk into a trio of housemade sauces of varying heat, though there’s also bottles of Maggi seasoning and sriracha to squirt to taste.
Three steamboats offer slightly less onerous pleasures, the canh chua is a deeply seductive sweet and sour soup in which skin-on barramundi fillets come swimming alongside pineapple, baby corn, chillies and spongy stalks of a plant known as elephant ear ($55).
Battered banana with coconut and a salted caramel sauce is a retrotastic way to finish with a grin ($12).
Busy, buzzy and beery, Bia Hoi is a whole lot of cool, casual, keenly priced fun. Mot, Hai,
Ba, Yo!
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