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A cook's guide to Springvale food: the Asian shopping strip, its Vietnamese and Cambodian roots, the Lunar New Year Festival, and a shaking beef recipe.
Springvale is a suburb that cooks talk about with a slightly guilty smile, because once you've shopped there, your local supermarket's Asian aisle never looks the same. The streets around Springvale Station are packed with Vietnamese, Malay, Chinese and Cambodian grocers, butchers, bakeries, roast meat shops and noodle houses, and the Springvale food scene has a depth that comes from decades of families cooking for their own community first.
This is part five of our Melbourne markets series. Last week we covered Footscray Market and Hopkins Street in the west. This week we head south-east to Springvale for a bit of history, a guide to the Lunar New Year Festival, what to buy, and a recipe for shaking beef.
How Springvale became a South-East Asian food hub
Springvale sits about 22 kilometres south-east of the Melbourne CBD, in the City of Greater Dandenong. Its shops along Springvale Road date back to the late 1800s, and over the twentieth century they changed with each new wave of arrivals. British and European migrants opened businesses after the First World War, and at one stage the strip was mostly Italian and Greek greengrocers, cafés and hairdressers.
The big change came with the Enterprise Migrant Hostel. Between 1972 and 1992 more than 30,000 immigrants and refugees were welcomed into the Springvale community. Through the 1970s and 1980s, refugees from South-East Asia arrived, and the ethnic Chinese communities from Vietnam and Cambodia became the dominant presence on the strip, which they remain today. More recently, Uyghur, Korean, Lao, Thai, Sri Lankan and Indian businesses have added to the mix.
The Springvale Lunar New Year Festival
Every year Springvale throws one of Melbourne's big Lunar New Year parties. The festival is run by the Springvale Asian Business Association with support from Greater Dandenong City Council. In 2024 Buckingham Avenue and the surrounding streets closed to traffic from 10am to 10pm for lion dancing, food stalls, rides and live entertainment, finishing with fireworks. It draws people from all over Melbourne, so arrive early and come by train.
If you can't make the festival, the weeks leading up to Lunar New Year are still a great time to visit. The grocers fill up with candied fruits, red envelopes, sticky rice cakes and festive treats. Our Lunar New Year food guide explains what they all mean.
Getting there and when to go
Springvale Station on the Pakenham and Cranbourne lines drops you right in the middle of the shopping district, so the train is the easiest way in. The main shopping streets are Springvale Road, Buckingham Avenue and Balmoral Avenue, all within a few minutes' walk of each other.
This is a shopping strip, not a market with one set of hours, so each shop keeps its own times. Mornings are best for fresh produce, seafood and bread, and weekends are busiest. A weekday morning gives you room to browse and time to ask questions.
What to buy for Springvale food at home
Roast meats and bakeries
Springvale's roast meat shops sell crisp-skinned roast pork, char siu and whole roast ducks by weight, which makes a fast weeknight dinner with rice and greens. The bakeries turn out bánh mì on crusty rolls baked on site, along with barbecue pork buns and, around the Mid-Autumn Festival, mooncakes.
Grocers and produce
The grocers here stock fruit and vegetables you'll rarely see elsewhere: hog plums, winter melon, luffa, long snake beans, fresh turmeric and galangal, and bundles of Vietnamese and Cambodian herbs. This is also the place for pantry staples like prahok (Cambodian fermented fish paste), kroeung paste, palm sugar, rice paper, and good fish sauce. Ask the shopkeeper which fish sauce they use at home.
Frozen and butcher
Look for freezers full of dumplings, wontons and fish you won't find at the supermarket, and butchers who sell offal, pork hock and pig's trotters for slow braises.
A few shopping tips
Bring cash, a couple of sturdy bags and a cooler bag. Write a list but leave room for one thing you've never cooked before, and ask how to use it. Most shopkeepers are happy to explain.
Buy roast meat last so it's still warm when you get home, and ask them to chop it for you. If you're buying rice paper, check the packet: thinner sheets are better for fresh rolls, thicker ones are easier for beginners.
Cook it tonight: shaking beef (bò lúc lắc / lok lak)
Shaking beef is loved in both Vietnam and Cambodia, which makes it a perfect dish for Springvale. In Vietnam it's bò lúc lắc, and in Cambodia it's lok lak. Either way, it's cubes of beef seared hard in a hot wok and shaken around the pan, served with a lime and pepper dipping sauce.
- 500g rump or scotch fillet, cut into 2.5cm cubes
- 1 tbsp oyster sauce, 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tsp fish sauce, 1 tsp sugar, 3 garlic cloves minced, 1 tsp cracked black pepper
- 2 tbsp neutral oil, 1 red onion cut into wedges, 1 tbsp butter (optional)
- To serve: watercress or lettuce, sliced tomato, steamed rice
- Dipping sauce: juice of 2 limes, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp cracked black pepper
Mix the beef with the oyster sauce, soy, fish sauce, sugar, garlic and pepper and leave it for 20 minutes while the wok heats. Get the oil smoking hot, add the beef in a single layer and leave it alone for a minute to brown, then shake the pan to sear the other sides. Cook it in two batches if your wok is small, because crowded meat steams and goes grey. Add the onion and the butter for the last 30 seconds, then tip it all onto a bed of watercress and tomato. Stir the lime juice, salt and pepper together in small bowls for dipping, and serve with rice.
Visit Springvale with Otao Kitchen
We can organise a visit to Springvale for your group as part of a cooking experience at Otao Kitchen. To keep things comfortable for shoppers and fair to the traders, each visit is capped at 20 people. Larger groups are very welcome: we run rolling visits, so no more than 20 of your group are there at a time.
See our Melbourne Market Cooking Experience →
Cook South-East Asian food with us
Our Melbourne Market to Kitchen class takes the mystery out of an Asian grocery shop and shows you how to turn it into dinner, hands-on, with a meal together at the end. For a deeper dive, our Vietnamese Cooking Masterclass covers the herbs, sauces and techniques behind dishes like bò lúc lắc in three hands-on hours.
Keep reading
- Victoria Street Richmond and Abbotsford: A Cook's Guide to Little Saigon
- Guide to Vietnamese Cooking at Home
