Corey Nguyen, 28, who grew up in Australia and owns the Usual with his partner, Jenny Ngo, said they wanted to introduce Cabramatta, which is dominated by traditional cafes selling Vietnamese-style coffee, to a more artisanal cafe culture.

“For us it’s never been a competition,” he said. “They do their thing, we do ours. I wish them all the best.”

It’s a good thing, said Andrew Nguyen, 24, who waited with a friend for his coffee after a traditional Vietnamese lunch. “All your Asian fixes are here,” he said. “It’s home to us.”

For many of Cabramatta’s first Vietnamese residents, it felt like anything but.

Before their arrival, the population was mostly working-class Australians and European migrants. A German-Austrian society center near the train station is one of a few remaining signs of that past.

During the ’70s, primarily American servicemen brought heroin to Sydney from Southeast Asia, said Andrew Jakubowicz, a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney. Cabramatta, with its links to Italian criminal groups and a new connection to Southeast Asia, would soon become a distribution point for the rest of the city.

For the Vietnamese, harboring the lingering trauma of war, the lack of an established Asian community in Cabramatta made it “a fairly desperate time,” Professor Jakubowicz said. “There was no history and structure available to respond to, and Australia was still very racist.”