Melbourne Night Noodle Markets 2014

Now in their second year, the Melbourne Night Noodle Markets have become an important fixture of the Good Food Month calendar in Melbourne. This year the organisers were better equipped to deal with the crowds and moved the markets to Birrarung Marr across three separate areas. It was a beautiful atmosphere, with open grassy spaces, the backdrop of the Melbourne skyline with the MCG, the Arts Centre spire and the Eureka tower in the background, and most importantly some of the best Asian food traders we have, there to showcase their food.

We started our foodie adventures with some dumplings at New Shanghai. This is the new dumpling place that has opened at the Emporium. I got the vegetarian dumplings, of which there were three in a serve. The dumplings were quite flavoursome but rather small, but still a good start to the evening.

Next up was Le Bangkok where we tried the tofu pad thai. Pad thai is one of our favourite noodle dishes, and this was a good one. There was a good amount of tofu which was contrasted by the freshness of the bean shoots and spring onion. I would definitely consider going back to the Le Bangkok restaurant to get some more.

I decided it was important to try a variety of cuisines, so after hitting up the Chinese and Thai stalls, I decided to move on to Sri Lankan. Lankan Tucker was there, and watching them use their skills to make kothu roti was enough to make me salivate. Unfortunately they only had chicken kothu roti, so I had to settle for a pan roll, but this was pretty damn good. Infact it was so good that it went down before I could get a photo.

We then moved on to our second area up on the hill of Birrarung Marr. This was definitely the premium area with both Kong and Chin Chin setting up shop here. Both had long lines, but I was adamant that we had to try at least one. Given that I still haven’t been to Kong, we decided to try their famous buns. Let me tell you, they were definitely worth the wait. I had the peanut butter salt and pepper tofu bun, with pickled mustard crushed peanuts, chilli mayonnaise and some fresh coriander to cut through it all. It was amazing and I could have eaten ten of them, but I forced myself to exercise some self control and stopped at just one.

And needless to say it would have been sacrilegious for me to walk past an Indian stall and not indulge in any Indian street food, so I made a stop at Overdosa. This was an all vego stall so I had a full menu to choose from, and I opted for the Bombay Burger. This was an aloo bonda (or spiced potato patty) in a vada pav roll (sweet milk bun), which was liberally slathered with tomato sauce and garnished with fresh green chilli. Definitely took me back to my Indian street food roots...

 

 

And of course we had to finish with dessert. Whilst the majority of the crowds flocked to the Gelato Messina stall, we opted for crème brulee at the Brulee Cart. We had a Dulce de Loco crème brulee which was a cardamom spiced custard sitting on a bed of poached pears and topped with some salted caramel popcorn. Unfortunately our crème brulee standards are pretty high, and whilst the flavours worked well together, the custard seemed a little runnier than we would have liked it. Still we polished it off quite easily, so I definitely wouldn’t call it all bad.

All in all it was a great evening. Perhaps some tips for people going next year:

Go on a weekday, go early in the season, and get there by 6pm at the latest. The people who went at about 7pm on the last Friday almost gave up waiting in hour long queues.

Take cash. There are only a handful of Citibank ATMs and they have massive queues.

See if you can get yourself into a marquee to secure a seat. This year both the Citibank and The Age marquees were available. The Citibank marquee required you to show your card, and The Age marquee required pre registration for subscribers.

And most importantly, go with an empty stomach. There is so much food, and it would be a sin not to make the most of it!