Bamboo Dumpling Bar: Really – A Bar that Serves Dumplings!

With Yum Cha fading from our sights and Tapas becoming all the rage, I decided to revert back to Asian food and give Bamboo in Surry Hills a try. Located behind the pub, it has its own door to enter through further up the street or you can just progress to the back area of the bar and into Bamboo.

It was a quick lunch so we ordered very little, keen to keep it cheap and fast. We started with two orders of five dumplings for $8.50 each (the pork and prawn Sui mai and the chicken dumplings). We also placed an order for the chicken stick rice ($8.50). Ordering is done up at the counter and the food is later brought to your table.

Also on the menu is a selection of daily specials for $10 each as well as spring rolls, skewers, duck pancakes and pork buns.

The restaurant is warm (handy when it’s freezing outside) with inside seating and an enclosed back section made to look like an outdoor area with brighter colours, lighting and decorations. We sat in the back at one of the long wooden tables.

Waiting for our order, we sat listening to the music playing through the loudspeakers and were surprised that instead of Asian sounding guitar or lyrical songs, we were hearing more Spanish sounding music, which changed to something more Western.

The decor is eclectic to say the least with hanging birdcages and rusty bicycles to framed phrases about dumplings!

The food came relatively quickly but we noticed that the chicken dumplings, though listed in five per serve area of the menu, only had four on the plate.

The Sui Mai looked, felt and tasted like dim sum (which isn’t bad if you like dim sum like we do) and the Chicken dumplings were slightly heavier, in a thicker, longer dumpling shell. However their casing led them to be a bit gluey in texture.

The sticky rice was delicious! We dug in with our wooden chopsticks and scooped out mounds of rice, kept hot in the pandang leaf. The chicken was more towards the bottom of the mound, but once we found it, we enjoyed large and small pieces of juicy chicken and proceeded to scrape the leaf for all the rice we could get!

Not a glorious restaurant by any means but great for a quirky no fuss lunch/dinner with mates. Oh and because they’re affiliated with the bar, they’re licensed too!

Bamboo Dumpling Bar
140 Commonwealth Street
Surry Hills, NSW

Price
$8.50-$15.00

Opening Hours
12-10pm (Lunch and Dinner)