Erindale Vietnamese Restaurant

If Middle Australia were a place it might be the Erindale Centre in Tuggeranong. Unpretentious members of "working families", kids in hoodies loitering outside fast food shops, a few burger wrappers, pizza boxes, and discarded bottles in the gutter - against a backdrop of gaudy yet essentially generic signage and sprawling carparking - it's got most of the basic elements.

Also, tucked away around a corner of one row of shops is the Erindale Vietnamese Restaurant - where time seems to have not moved on from the late-80s or early-90s. Orange vinyl upholstered seats are set around wood-patterned formica-covered tables. Payment by credit card still takes place via an old sliding zip-zap contraption with paper dockets. There are real orchids, low prices, and menus with quirky spelling and grammar.

That all said, the food is OK - tasty and relatively light. Funnily enough the retro-aesthetic also extended to one of our dishes. Made with the restaurant's "special sauce", one bite immediately stirred memories of Chinese takeaways in another unremarkable suburb of a decade or so ago. This perhaps sums up the place, along with Erindale, in that they both seem like they could be anywhere, yet for us at least, also feel profoundly homely and familiar.