Bashan is a small eatery in Hobart Place, specialising in Sichuan street food. Photo: Tenele Conway.
The term ‘hidden gem’ has always felt a bit showy to me. Is it really hidden? Is it really a gem? It makes my spidey senses tingle.
Despite this, I have a hidden gem for you: Bashan.
This postcard-sized eatery serving Sichuan food, sold under the simple statement “real Chinese food”, meets all the criteria to be a hidden gem.
Its address is London Circuit, yet it has no shopfront on London Circuit. It’s been around for close to five years, yet it remained unknown to me. And the food is good – good enough to come back for again, and in my mind, that makes it a hard-to-find gem, at least.
Still wondering where Bashan is? It’s tucked into Hobart Place, adjacent to the cafe Two Before Ten. It’s the sort of location that if you don’t know, you don’t know, and with London Circuit being closed to traffic for the next two years, this gem just got a whole lot more hidden.
This is the type of restaurant that will fit perfectly into your after-work, affordable dining repertoire. A place for those nights when cooking dinner is the last thing you want to do, and you want unfussy dining with flavours that will slap you around a little.
After-work dining, for me anyway, is an early activity. I have no shame in eating at 5 pm if it means I don’t have to go to the supermarket. Arrive at Bashan at 5 and you may find the blinds firmly pulled down. This doesn’t mean they’re closed; they’re just in a battle with the setting sun, which explodes through their windows for a brief period.
The after-work crowd was in full swing on a Monday night. Photo: Tenele Conway.
When the blinds open, you’ll see a cute little eatery with beech tables dotted around a central counter clad in maroon tiles.
The menu is available on a QR code at the table, or you can order at the counter. Controversial opinion: I love ordering on a QR code; it suits my DIY nature and avoids the issue of waving down a server that you may have previously sent away to spend more time perusing your options.
The menu is predominantly street food from the region of Chongqing in China, known for its mouth-numbing use of Sichuan pepper. If you are uninitiated to the experience of Sichuan pepper, I encourage you to try it here. It isn’t spicy in the sense you likely know it; it gives you a sensation that your mouth is watering, a side effect from the plant compound hydroxy-alpha sanshool that stimulates the touch receptors in your mouth.
In addition to the Chongqing specialties, there’s a “special menu” that contains more classic Australian-Cantonese fusion dishes like sweet and sour pork and honey chicken. My recommendation would be to skip this section; you can get that food anywhere. This is a place for the food of Chongqing.
On this particular Monday night, I went in for a clay pot of pork mince and pickles and scowled at my dining partner for wanting laksa, making him get a braised beef noodle soup (it’s OK, he married me, he’s used to it).
The braised beef soup is a hearty dish. Photo: Martin Conway (scowlee).
The spicy dishes come with a choice of heat from mild to extra spicy. I landed on spicy. Some of the dishes allow you to choose between rice or wheat noodles. My recommendation would be wheat noodles as I found the rice noodles lacking a little of the chewiness that I prefer in a noodle.
The clay pot arrived and was similar in scale to your average-sized backyard above-ground swimming pool, filled with a fiery broth that promised repercussions.
At the first dunk of the spoon, I thought I may have been overly ambitious in my tolerance for heat, but once beneath the layer of chilli oil that floats on the surface, the heat evens out to a manageable level, not really building, but always slightly making you question your life choices.
This soup really hit the spot. The pickles, which I think were pickled greens of some description, were face-puckeringly tart; the pork mince was tender and plentiful; the soup was slightly sweet with a backnote of tart that gets you on the back of the tongue; and the black fungus and bean sprouts added texture and dimension. At a cost of $18.80, this bowl could easily serve two people if you can catch those slippery noodles to actually dish it up.
Having ordered a second soup, the braised beef noodle soup, there was an expectation in the back of my mind that the same broth may be used in both. It was a pleasant surprise to find a broth with a totally different set of flavour profiles.
This soup was much meatier in flavour, sweeter and less tart. The cubes of braised beef were incredibly tender, the kind that can escape your chopsticks as it breaks apart, and the stronger texture of the wheat noodles works well with the hearty nature of the soup. At $18.80 a bowl, this size of this dish was more manageable for one person but still more than we could actually finish.
The pork mince and pickles noodle soup is a deep and spicy bowl. Photo: Tenele Conway.
The shallot pancake that we ordered on the side was a little lacking in shallots but was about as flaky as a pastry product can be and made for the perfect dunker to mop up soup with.
I’ve already spied the dishes I will be coming back for. Spicy pipis with glass noodles in a clay pot for $29.80 sounds like a messy sharing dish I’d like to dig into. The pork wonton in chicken soup for $15.80 is ideal for a quick lunch when you don’t want to go back to the office covered in chilli oil, and the mapo tofu for $19.80 is a steal. It’s the type of dish that makes my meaty heart ponder if I could actually become a vegetarian.
There is also a large selection of rice sets, which will get you a full meal with a serving of a main dish and a side of rice served together.
Bashan is located in Hobart Place on London Circuit and is open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week (if you can find it).
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