Stray from the main Dixon Street strip to visit Old Town Hong Kong Cuisine, a stylish but affordable Chinese eatery. Continuing Sydney's love affair with steamed pork buns, as well as a range of dumplings and excellent peking duck. Nostalgic dishes with a contemporary twist will have you going to his casual but well serviced eatery again and again.
There are two sections to Dixon Street: the main one is the pedestrian walkway, with restaurant hawkers offering menus and pungent wafts of frying chicken and sweet soy floating out of restaurants in clouds of steam. This is the end that everyone knows, the heart of Chinatown. However, if you cross Goulburn Street and walk towards Liverpool, there is another section that is worth visiting. With a number of openings in the last few years, including the awesomely fun and original N2 Extreme Gelato (they churn their ice cream fresh using liquid nitrogen) and New Hong Kong Café, this side of the street is living up to its better known neighbour.
On a Wednesday night, the two-storey restaurant is heaving with chatter and the clatter of chopsticks and we have to wait in queue for a table. However, the efficient maître d' has us seated upstairs in less than five minutes and we order a round of Tsingtao beers. The neon sign outside, dark timber interiors and dragon heads with water features on the wall, lift the place from an average in-and-out eatery to one with a little class and ambience.
The menu is like a piled plate of sticky noodles – promising satisfaction but difficult and time-consuming to get through. There is an extensive selection of dumplings, duck, seafood (some of which is swimming in tanks near us) and tofu dishes. First choice is the steamed buns – there is two types of pork as well as duck in these simple, one-hand pockets made popular by Momofuko's chef David Chang. Eat them quick as they taste best hot and then move on to the dumplings. The Xiao long bao, or dumplings filled with soup as well as meat, have to be some of the best I've tasted; nibble at the side and drink the light, richly flavoured broth, dip in black vinegar and the tender casing gives away to juicy pork. The bird's nest dumplings with a spider web of crisp shell connecting them adds a delicious crunch to the pan-fried morsels. Whatever you do, make sure you order a dish with duck in it – the pancakes look excellent and the standard plate is a pile of tender meat with crisp skin in hoi sin sauce; make sure there is enough to share of this dish.
The deep-fried bean curd with spicy salt is a little, well, salty but moreish and the stir-fried chicken noodles were pretty tasty but not excellent. Save room for dessert – another very tough choice, with mango pancakes, sweet sago soup and the interesting-sounding deep fried egg white. We could only fit one in so I chose the green tea snow flake (mainly because it sounded pretty) which was a ripple of green tea ice cream that looked like spaghetti, jelly cubes, red bean and strawberries; the perfect light final course.
It is occasionally difficult to get the attention of the waiters but when you do your request arrives within minutes. The food is excellent, quick to come out and the restaurant's happy, bustling vibe makes it a place likely to become a Chinatown favourite.
Features :
