We get so excited when we find out a spot is a modern take of Vietnamese food. Cham is a cafe in Melbourne CBD that offers Vietnamese inspired dishes in brunch style. We dined as a group of 5 on a Saturday. The place was full but there was no queue.
Drinks
It’s a cafe so of course the drinks are the highlight. This was chuối nướng latte $8, a coffee inspired by grilled banana and holy shit, it tasted like the real dessert. It was delicious.
This was their iced egg coffee $9, which was Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk and an eggy foam on top. This is a classic in Vietnam and Cham did a great job bringing this to Melbourne.
Food
This was their sticky rice for $16.50. It had Northern short grain sticky rice, cold cut meats, Chinese sausage, in-house pate, pork floss, dried shrimp, pickled vegetables and an egg. Mick said it was quite average. The rice was too wet, even for sticky standards.
We got the rice paper roll with pork belly. This was $8.50 for 1 roll, sliced into 4 pieces. It was a bit dry and the pork belly was bland. The dipping sauce was lacking in so much flavour too because they didn’t caramelize the fish sauce, only adding it straight from the bottle.
I got a chicken pho for $26.50. This was a free-range thigh cooked for 12 hours with an onsen egg. I’ve made a 12-hour pho before (LINK) and I think they’re bullshitting about the cooking time because the broth was lacking hard. It needed a bit more oomph. It did have a good chicken flavour but lacked depth. The chicken tasted more sous vide than described. Otherwise a decent bowl but for $26.50, we’ll pass.
This was the bánh mì chảo breakfast skillet. It had a pate, meatballs, egg, pickled vegetables and a grilled banh mi roll in butter. It looked great and our non-Vietnamese friend said it tasted great, but based off the other dishes, we know it would be lacking from the real bò né.
Service
The service was friendly and good.
Review
The concept was nice. The flavours were close but they seemed to cater to western taste buds a lot more which sucks because Vietnamese food is in-your-face with flavour. If they added more seasoning, we would come back but for now, we would only return for the drinks.
Thanks for reading. Happy eating.
Thanks for reading. Happy eating.
