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Sydney Night Noodle Market

Hyde Park is one of the nicest open spaces in the Sydney CBD and on any given day you'll find anyone and everyone ranging from your average office worker, taking time out for lunch in the park, to flair bartenders, throwing bottles over their shoulder and perfecting their skills. It made sense on paper to hold a night noodle market in Hyde Park, after all, where else would you find as much room for the huge variety of food vendors?

It's not every day that you are able to get off from work and let the evening slip away, sitting in the outdoors with friends and family. I've always seen night noodle markets in asian countries as being all about the food, rather than the atmosphere, but Sydney-siders have a different approach. The burly old asian men drinking Tiger beer were replaced with the corporate workhorses, sipping on wine. The plastic chairs and tables were still there, but every so often you'd see a blanket spread out with couples and families making a picnic out of it. You'd never see that in an asian country. The stray cats and dogs were replaced by the random household pet, brought along for company and the hot sweltering heat was replaced by a cool evening breeze. A VIP section for certain guests? It was a bit of a surprise for me really, to see what's usually a bit of a squabble turned into, dare I say it, a sophisticated night out for some.

As demonstrated recently at M-Fest, food fairs have quite a bit of a line. Forget about being able to roam from one stall to the next trying to get some variety - you'll be there all night, with one of my friends waiting in line for almost an hour just to get a plate of food. You can join the longest line, hoping that people are in there because the food is good and not because they're doing what you're doing and hoping everyone else is right, or you can join the shortest queue, get some food and run the risk of it lacking any flavour. Unfortunately, I picked the latter and for $10 received a large paper plate full of noodles that could have been shredded newspaper for all I know.

Personally, the key draw point for noodle markets in Asia is that the food is cheap, it's quick and it tastes fantastic. My selection of food unfortunately failed on all three accounts as did my partner's. Aside from that, I would have been willing to let it slide. After all, the food was produced in giant batches for the masses, not as it was ordered. Any other approach would probably have seen queues triple in size. After all the atmosphere was nice, right?

One of the problems with Hyde Park is that it plays home to the bat community almost as soon as the sun goes down and you can't exactly have a Night Noodle Market during the day, can you? I was hit by bat droppings twice when I was there, witnessed two other tables get bombarded and a family get up and move, table and all. Needless to say, I didn't have a great time and left fairly early once my food had been contaminated, but I can see that this was most likely circumstantial and would not necessarily reflect the state of the evening for others.

If you want to have a nice evening out in the park, the Sydney Night Noodle Market is a fair choice. Ironically, if you're looking for a genuine hawker style night noodle market, you'll be fairly disappointed as this isn't what it's about, but the real deal is fairly hard to find in Sydney and not without a premium.