V Rating: VVV
Where: 16a Hickson Road, Walsh Bay
Tel: (02) 9241 4365.
Price: Entree:$3.50- $8. Main: $13 - $15 (veg).

Hickson Road in Walsh Bay has morphed into a mini-theatre strip, with the Sydney Theatre Company and Bangara Dance Theatre calling it home. It’s the kind of area where you drop by before a show, looking for quick, cheap food, not demanding the best quality but needing to eat something to stave off hunger (and loud stomach noises) during the performance. But thanks to the area’s industrial past and knockout harbour views, quick, cheap food is not easy to find.

Fortunately, there is one restaurant that caters to the theatre crowd. Its name is the Walsh Bay Cafe. You probably wouldn’t guess this from the “Chinese Cuisine” sign hanging out the front. That’s why I’ve helpfully posted a photo here.

The small inside room is surprisingly cute and modern, with vibrant red tablecloths and bold Chinese character wallpaper. The restaurant is BYO, and you can scoot next door to a bottle shop if you’re after wine with your meal.

Walsh Bay Cafe offers 12 vegetarian choices, including Chinese classics like salt and pepper tofu, ma po tofu, garlic baby spinach and tofu and snowpeas in black bean sauce. We tried the stir-fry vegetables and noodles, along with a tofu and vegetable stir-fry. The dishes weren’t going to set the world on fire, but they came quickly and had a fresh, healthy flavour.

Afterwards we ambled across the road to the Bangara Theatre to see a Sydney Writers Festival event on China called “Is Communism All Bad?” The main speaker on the panel was Diane Wei Liang, a Chinese author now living in Europe who was a student activist in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests. There were some fairly sobering observations about the state of democracy and human rights in China, mixed with optimism for the future.

Diane’s description of how Tiananmen Square unfolded inspired me to read her autobiography, The Lake With No Name. Having only seen Western reporting on Tiananmen, it was fascinating to read about it from the perspective of someone who was there. Wei describes how the protest grow from a spontaneous outburst, to a youth-fired mass movement, to a violent end when the army entered the Square. Definitely food for thought as we plan our trip there at the end of the year.

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