Alex 'N' Rolls ~ Vietnamese Street Food, Marricvkille

Our adventures in walking and takeaway continue with Alex N' Rolls in Marrickville.

Any business that has a good outdoor serving space is a big plus during a zombie apocalypse. While takeaway is king at the moment, Alex 'n' Rolls along Illawarra Rd is excellent for a lunch stop. The store is the converted front of a house with a window at the front which makes it easy to order and stand at a reasonable distance while waiting.

There is one lunch perfectly suited for takeaway: the banh mi. Not only is it portable, it doesn't require any plastic packaging or cutlery. The other option of sticky rice keeps the plastic minimal as well.

The roast and braised meats as filling options are a big reason to head here. Roast, slow cooked and BBQ pork all look great and the roast chicken is juicy and tender.

The menu choices - its either a roll or sticky rice.

The sticky rice with pork is a generous serve of slow cooked, wobbly meat with sides of cha lua, lap cheong, pickled radish and cucumber.

Traditional slow cooked pulled pork is not too sloppy, there's just enough to hold the fillings together. There's a couple of slices of cha lua to make it closer to your usual banh mi, as well as pate and pickles. The roll is crisp and warm and the bread style is a little fuller than the lighter hot bread roll shop style.

The roll that really blasted our socks off was the Vietnamese dill fish cake. These are softly braised fish patties with flecks of dill throughout. Oh mama, they were juicy and gave up bites of real fish. Lucky we had one each, no sharing on this one.

This post was brought to you by friendly Marrickville pussy cat Oscar, keeping a good 1.5m away.

Alex 'n' Rolls is at 321 Illawarra Rd, Marrickville, just up from the excellent grocery stores.