The pork tawa set is best consumed on the spot on a little blue stool. Photo: Martin Conway.
If you aren’t yet partaking in the wonders of the many Nepalese food trucks popping up all over Canberra, this is your heads-up to get out there, and Bhok Laagyo in Franklin is a great place to start.
Gungahlin is the epicentre of this wave of mobile Nepalese dining, and Bhok Laagyo, which is recreating the street dining experience from Pokhara in the Gandaki region of central Nepal, has nabbed an ideal location on Kilmeny Close, right in front of a large mixed-use recreation park.
In terms of food truck dining, this means there is minimal passing traffic, and while you perch yourself street-style on a little blue stool, the kids can go to the park and burn off excess energy; it’s the ultimate family dining experience.
My recent visit to check Bhok Laagyo out was not my first Nepalese food truck rodeo, so I came into it with a little prior knowledge of what to expect.
Chef Binod knows flavour and packs it into every meal at Bhok Laagyo. Photo: Bhok Laagyo.
At first glance my thoughts were that the menu appeared to be very similar to what most of the Nepalese food trucks are dishing up, and I felt a little deflated, hoping to find something new, but these guys, with Chef Binod at the helm, have a couple of secret ingredients that made this experience stand out.
The first secret to their top-notch street-side offering is the service. The staff are very welcoming and exceedingly polite, a fact that the whole of the internet seems to agree with and is regularly mentioned alongside their 4.8-star Google rating.
With our order placed, we looked around at the gathered crowd and followed suit for the seating arrangements: one little blue stool per person and an extra to serve as a table, perfect.
As the food arrived, we were let in on the next secret that Bhok Laagyo has up its sleeve, intense flavours. All Nepalese food I had had to date was full of flavour, but this really took things up to 11. Spicy, crunchy, sour, jammy, sweet, juicy … the experience covered all the adjectives.
The pork tawa set came with three dishes in one divided container. The marinated grilled pork belly is heavily spiced and served in thin slices, which is topped with a spicy and sour sauce. Our tolerance for spice came under suspicion and it was suggested that we may like our sauce on the side, an offer that we took up and were glad that we did. On its own, this pork is immensely enjoyable, but with the two sides, including dried and crunchy beaten rice and a chaat which seemed to be made with dried soybeans, this dish is an event.
Jammy and spicy, you can’t go wrong with chilli momos. Photo: Martin Conway.
To accompany the pork tawa set we doubled down on the spice and ordered chilli buffalo momos. If you’re into momos and you haven’t yet explored the world of chilli momos, I highly recommend this be your next order.
Chilli momos are served in a thick, jammy, almost caramelised sauce that takes a plate of the juicy little dumplings from feeling like a starter and transforms it into a solid main dish. The sauce also consists of onion and red capsicum, and it’s all tossed together in a fiery red spectacle.
The defining feature of the Bhok Laagyo momos is the meat, packed full of spices and flavour; when paired with the rich sauce, you’ve got a winner here.
Sitting in the late afternoon sun, surrounded by people from all around the world, I got a little fuzzy feeling that was not related to my spice-pickled tongue. While I don’t think Australia will ever have the sort of street food scene that you can experience in Southeast Asia or the subcontinent, it’s moments like these where I think that on a small scale, we’re getting close to recreating that feeling. It’s communal, affordable, unpretentious and brings with it an opportunity to share in flavours with our fellow Canberrans that speak to tradition and heritage, and that’s worth a drive to Franklin in my books.
Bhok Laagyo is located on Kilmeny Close, Franklin and is open 7 days a week from 2 until 8 pm.
