Cheap Eats Under $20 in Richmond 2026: Victoria Street & Beyond

Updated 16 March 2026 | 6 places tested | Priya Sandhu reporting

Richmond has always been Melbourne’s worst-kept secret for budget-friendly eating. Victoria Street — or Little Saigon, as the locals properly call it — remains one of the last pockets of the inner east where a tenner still buys you a genuinely excellent meal. But the strip has shifted in the past year. Some old favourites have tightened portions, a couple of new spots have appeared, and prices have crept up everywhere (thanks, cost of living). So we walked the length of Victoria Street, ducked down Bridge Road, and ate our way through the best cheap eats Richmond has to offer. Every place on this list kept us under twenty bucks.

1. Nhu Lan Bakery — The Banh Mi Benchmark

📍 152 Victoria Street, Richmond 💵 Budget roll: $9–$11 | Combo with iced coffee: ~$14

Nhu Lan has been baking its own baguettes daily since before most of us were born, and the proof is literally in the bread. That crackling, shatteringly crisp crust yielding to a soft, airy interior — it’s the reason people line up out the door at 8am on a Saturday.

The classic special roll ($9.50) is the one to order: barbecued pork, pâté, a smear of mayo, pickled carrot and daikon, fresh chilli, and a flurry of coriander. It’s a masterclass in balance. The bread-to-filling ratio is spot on, which sounds like a minor detail until you’ve had a banh mi that’s 80 per cent bread and sadness.

The BBQ pork roll remains king, but the lemongrass chicken roll ($10) is the sleeper hit — juicy, fragrant, and just spicy enough. Grab a Vietnamese iced coffee ($4.50) to wash it down and you’re out the door for under fifteen dollars.

Pro tip: Go before 10am. The bread is at peak crispness, the queue moves faster, and you’ll avoid the lunchtime scrum of Richmond workers who’ve discovered the same thing.

2. I Love Pho 264 — Victoria Street’s Best Broth

📍 264 Victoria Street, Richmond 💵 Pho from $14 | Large beef pho: $16.50

In a strip overflowing with pho joints, I Love Pho 264 earns its name through one thing: the broth. It’s clear, deeply savoury, and carries that long-simmered beef bone sweetness that separates genuine pho from the packet-stuff imitations. Multiple TripAdvisor reviewers — including one who travels to Saigon and Hanoi for work — have called it among the best pho they’ve had anywhere. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a bloke with frequent-flyer points doing a direct comparison.

The beef pho dac biet ($16.50) is the move — rare beef, brisket, tendon, and beef balls swimming in that magnificent broth. For something lighter, the chicken pho ($14) is clean, delicate, and perfect for a cold Melbourne autumn afternoon.

The space is modest: plastic stools, fluorescent lighting, zero pretension. This is a pho shop, not a photo opportunity. And that’s exactly right.

What to order: Beef pho dac biet, with extra bean sprouts and a squeeze of lime. Add a side of Vietnamese spring rolls ($7 for four) if you’re still hungry, and you’ll still be well under twenty dollars.

3. Super Bowl Pho & Bun Bo Hue — The Spicy Alternative

📍 252 Victoria Street, Richmond 💵 Bun Bo Hue from $15 | Pho from $14

Two doors down from I Love Pho sits Super Bowl, and if you’ve only ever ordered pho, this is the place to broaden your horizons. The namesake dish — Bun Bo Hue — is a spicy, lemongrass-forward noodle soup from the city of Hue in central Vietnam. It’s bolder, more complex, and punchier than pho, with thin rice noodles, thick slices of beef, pork, and cubes of congealed pig’s blood (which sounds confronting but melts into the broth like umami butter).

Super Bowl does Bun Bo Hue properly: the broth has genuine heat, not just a token chilli swirl, and the lemongrass fragrance hits you before the bowl even reaches the table. At $15 for a regular serve, it’s extraordinary value for a soup that takes hours to build.

Their standard beef pho ($14) is also solid — not quite at I Love Pho’s level, but cheaper and still better than most pho you’ll find outside the strip.

Atmosphere: Family-run, no-nonsense, fast service. Open until 10pm, making it one of the best late-night cheap eats on Victoria Street.

4. Mister Minh — Bridge Road’s Quiet Achiever

📍 350 Bridge Road, Richmond 💵 Vermicelli bowls from $15 | Special fried rice: $16 | Spring rolls: $8

While Victoria Street grabs all the headlines, Mister Minh quietly does excellent work on Bridge Road — a fifteen-minute walk south through Richmond’s factory outlet district. The menu leans into classic Vietnamese home cooking rather than street food, and there’s a warmth to the place that the more utilitarian Victoria Street spots don’t always deliver.

The special vermicelli noodles with spring rolls ($15.50) is the standout: a mountain of cool, slippery bun noodles topped with crispy fried spring rolls, fresh herbs, pickled vegetables, and a generous pour of nuoc cham. It’s fresh, textural, and absurdly filling for the price. The beef pho ($16) holds its own against the Victoria Street heavyweights, with a well-spiced broth and tender meat.

Mister Minh also does a “Bring It On” option where the kitchen selects your meal for you. It’s a trust exercise, and one that consistently pays off — expect a mix of whatever’s freshest that day.

Good to know: The evening crowd is lively, and the restaurant earns a 4.2 rating on Uber Eats. Dine-in is better value than delivery, obviously, but it’s a solid fallback for Richmond locals who can’t be bothered leaving the house.

5. Thy Thy Counter & Canteen — Old-School Roots, Fresh Approach

📍 60–66 Victoria Street, Richmond 💵 Rice dishes from $14 | Pho from $15 | Banh flan: $5

Thy Thy has deep roots on Victoria Street. The original Thy Thy restaurant was one of the first Vietnamese eateries to open on the strip, and the Counter & Canteen incarnation — launched by the founder’s daughters — carries that legacy forward with a cleaner, more contemporary fit-out while keeping prices firmly in cheap-eats territory.

The menu covers the Vietnamese greatest hits but adds some less common dishes. The banh xeo (Vietnamese savoury pancake, $14) is worth the visit alone: golden, crispy-edged, stuffed with prawns, pork, bean sprouts, and wrapped in lettuce and herbs. It’s a hands-on eating experience that rewards patience.

The rice plates are excellent value — grilled pork with rice ($14) comes with a fried egg, pickles, and fish sauce on the side. The portion is generous, the pork is properly caramelised, and it’s the kind of satisfying, no-fuss lunch that keeps Richmond office workers coming back.

Finish with a banh flan ($5) — Vietnam’s answer to crème caramel — silky, coffee-tinged, and the perfect sweet note to end on.

Why it matters: Thy Thy represents the next generation of Victoria Street dining — respectful of tradition but not afraid to modernise. It’s also one of the few spots on the strip where you’d happily bring a visitor who’s never had Vietnamese food before.

6. Phuoc Hung Bakery — The Quiet Contender

📍 152 Victoria Street, Richmond 💵 Banh mi from $9 | Iced coffee: $4

Right next to Nhu Lan, Phuoc Hung Bakery is the kind of place you walk past a dozen times before someone insists you try it. Run by a father-and-son team who bake their baguettes in-house daily, it’s built a quietly devoted following — particularly among Richmond locals who’ve done the Nhu Lan comparison and decided Phuoc Hung edges it on bread quality.

The BBQ pork banh mi ($9.50) is the standard order: well-seasoned pork, a proper pâté layer, crisp pickled vegetables, fresh chilli, and coriander on bread that cracks audibly when you bite into it. The lemongrass tofu banh mi ($9) is one of the best vegan cheap eats in the inner east — it’s not an afterthought, it’s a properly built sandwich.

Where Phuoc Hung really shines is consistency. Every roll we’ve had — and we’ve had plenty — has been identical in quality. That kind of reliability from a small family bakery is genuinely impressive.

Accessibility: They take EFTPOS (a real plus on a strip where some places still prefer cash), and the queue rarely exceeds five minutes even at peak hour.

Honourable Mentions

A few other Richmond spots that nearly made the cut:

• Co Do (Victoria Street) — Specialises in Hue-style cuisine. Their Bun Bo Hue is legendary among Melbourne’s Vietnamese community. Worth a visit if you want something different from standard pho.
• Van Mai (Victoria Street) — A long-standing family restaurant with reliable rice plates and noodle soups. Nothing flashy, everything solid.
• N. Lee Bakery Cafe — A modern banh mi spot with a broader café-style menu. Slightly pricier than the old-guard bakeries but good quality.

What We Skipped and Why

Not everything on Victoria Street deserves your money, and being honest about the misses is part of the job.

The tourist-facing spots near North Richmond station have gradually increased prices while reducing portion sizes. A couple of places we visited (which we won’t name, because we’re not in the business of burying small businesses) are now charging $18–$20 for regular bowls that were $14 two years ago, with noticeably less protein. When the value equation breaks, we move on.

A couple of newer “modern Vietnamese” cafés on the fringes of Richmond have jumped on the $22+ small-plates bandwagon. The food is fine — sometimes good — but it’s not cheap eats. A $19 rice paper roll platter with micro herbs and edible flowers is a different proposition from a $9 banh mi, and we’re drawing the line at twenty dollars for a reason.

Delivery-only ghost kitchens that pop up on Uber Eats and DoorDash under various Vietnamese-sounding names were also excluded. If there’s no physical shopfront, no queue, and no way to verify the food is being made fresh, it doesn’t make our list. We’re recommending places you can walk into, eat at, and judge with your own eyes.

How Richmond Compares to the Neighbours

Richmond’s cheap eats scene is tightly clustered around Vietnamese cuisine, which is both its strength and its limitation. If you want diversity, you’ll need to branch out:

• Cremorne — Just south of Richmond, Cremorne is more café-and-pub territory. A few solid lunch spots exist around Church Street, but the $20 budget gets squeezed harder here.

• Collingwood — Smith Street and its surrounds offer far more variety — Ethiopian, Middle Eastern, dumplings, Japanese, and a thriving vegan scene. Collingwood wins on diversity; Richmond wins on value per dollar.

• South Yarra — Chapel Street’s cheap eat options have thinned out dramatically. You’re mostly looking at food courts and the occasional well-priced outlier. South Yarra is where cheap eats go to retire.

The truth is, if you want the best value for your twenty dollars in Melbourne’s inner east, Victoria Street in Richmond is still the undisputed champion. Nothing else comes close.

The MELBZ Methodology

We don’t do paid placements, and we don’t write nice things because someone sent us a free meal. Here’s how we tested:

1. We visited each restaurant in person during a normal lunch or dinner service.
2. We ordered from the menu — no special treatment, no advance notice.
3. We paid full price and tracked every dollar against the $20 ceiling.
4. We returned at least once to each place to check consistency.
5. We measured value on three factors: portion size relative to price, food quality, and overall experience.

Prices were verified in March 2026 and may change. Some restaurants adjust seasonally.

Quick Reference: Your $20 Cheat Sheet

Priya Sandhu is the Food Editor at MELBZ. She has been eating her way through Melbourne’s inner suburbs since 2019 and has strong opinions about bread-to-filling ratios.

Have a cheap eat we missed? Tell us on Instagram @melbzcomau or email priya@melbz.com.au.