About Banh Mi Sydney

Banh Mi Sydney is a directory of banh mi shops in Sydney. Every listing is a real shop with a real street address. Community voting is coming; when it launches, rankings will come from votes by people who ate there, not from ads, paid placements or an editor picking favourites. Until then the list is a list, not a ranking.

A note from the founder

I ran a Vietnamese restaurant for more than ten years. In that time I learned two things about banh mi. First, the best roll in a suburb is often not the place with the most Google reviews. It is the bakery on the corner that has been doing the same thing every morning for twenty years, or the grocer that sells rolls from a bain-marie by the register and never bothered to list itself as a "Vietnamese restaurant". Second, people searching "banh mi Sydney" have usually already decided what they want for lunch. They just need the most current, most specific answer, fast.

Every existing "best banh mi in Sydney" page is a static top 10 built on Google ratings. This site is being built to be alive instead: locals suggest spots now, and will vote on them and hold the crown for their suburb once accounts launch. Shops can claim their listing for free.

How ranking will work

When voting launches, the headline rating on every listing will be our own community rating, from votes by people on this site. Google's star rating, where we have it, is shown separately as a labelled reference that links back to Google. It is refreshed about once every three months, so it can lag if a shop changes quickly. We will never mix the two numbers.

New suggestions are checked against Google's business listings and against our one rule: the shop has to actually sell banh mi. Contributor badges (Scout, Trailblazer, Cartographer, Legend) and a suburb crown for the most active local are planned for when community accounts launch.

What we list, and what we don't

We list shops that actually sell banh mi: dedicated banh mi shops, Vietnamese hot bread bakeries, pork roll counters, and cafes and grocers that make a proper roll. We do not pad the list with pho restaurants or general Vietnamese restaurants that happen to be in the right suburb, and we removed a batch of those once we caught it. Listing counts on this site are true counts.

Sydney only, to start. We would rather be genuinely complete in the suburbs we cover than thin everywhere.

Banh Mi Dash

Banh Mi Dash is a one-tap game where a banh mi dodges pizza, burgers and hot dogs. It is free and there is no sign-up. Badges and shop-donated prizes are planned once accounts and a participating shop exist; until then, play for fun.

Get in touch

Missing shop? Suggest it. Run a shop? Claim your listing from its page. Everything else, start at the full Sydney guide.