After walking along Fitzroy Street pre-gig, looking for a decent way to fill up on food for a reasonable price ... The Hard Wok Cafe looked a decent deal, and who am I to resist a bad pun?

So we sat down at the non-umbrella-ed table and perused the menu and surroundings ... a scrawled greeting on the wall courtesy of Greg Fleet, many tour posters, past, present and up-coming ... what looked like those bamboo mats you might use to roll your own sushi laid out across the simple square wooden table ...

Menu offerings covered a range of hawker-style food ... satay skewers, tom yum soup, curry laksa, samosas, mee goreng, gado gado, spring rolls, and probably some other stuff as well... we took our time to decide... or was it that we were given a lot of time to decide ... there was someone we thought was a customer in the place, who actually turned out to be a not quite on the ball waitress ... Em had the mee goreng, Decay chose the gado gado (vegetarian!), and I decided to have the tom kha gai ... and we had a couple of plates of spring rolls with sweet chilli dipping sauce for starters ...

After a while, the food arrived in some sort of disorder... starters came after the main meals, which were presented disjointedly ... we tucked in however, and found the food to be quite ok ... the tom kha gai I had was faintly coconutty and vaguely spicy (I would've preferred more spice but then again I've got no tastebuds left), with chunks of chicken resting on the bottom of the bowl ... the spring rolls were nice ... filled with vegetables other than cabbage, and some rice vermicelli as well. Em and Decay both seemed to enjoy their choices also.

Decay seemed to think that the service was a bit slow here, but I found it ok ... well, anything's ok when compared to that café in CCW ... one of them may have seeemed a bit scatterbrained but it was mostly the other waitress doing the actual bringing out the food bit ...

Overall, I'll say yum ... nice for a casual bite to eat, OK value (~$40.00 for three) ... it's only a small place... 7 out of 10 ?