The Hideout

There’s been a lot of movement among the wine bars of Sydney over the past few weeks. Love Tilly Devine have opened their doors; Time to Vino have shifted into bigger digs under the Diamont Hotel in Kings Cross; and there’s this Five Ways newbie. The Hideout employs all those things you expect to see in a little bar – blackboard menu, bundles of designer incandescent globes, galley kitchen with simple snacks, requisite neighbourhood dog lazing about outside, reclaimed furniture, ye olde wine poster on the wall. And that’s all fine. But there’s little evidence so far that anyone has managed to join the dots between it all.

OK, so two thumbs up for the amazing rolling library ladder propped up against the wine wall. But the wine list, employing a predominantly Australian mix of wines that are to be changed by the season, isn’t really winning any hearts. You might argue that to keep the prices down in a neighbourhood bar it means a focus on less expensive drops. The Allinda savagnin at $5.50 a 75ml taste is a total bargain – if you don't count the way it tastes. The thing is, you can partly forgive sub-par wine when you’re listening to sweet tracks (not Café del Mar or any of its derivatives, like we’re listening to here) and get great service. But it takes over 20 minutes to get a drink (it’s table service only), which means 20 minutes of listening to non-music and trying to get our waiter’s attention. And this isn’t the first time. Our visit the week before saw us standing around being completely ignored before cutting our losses and leaving having had nothing to drink at all. There’s something wrong with the system here. They either need to rethink the table service idea, or they need to employ a few more people on the floor.

It’s great that Paddington has a neighbourhood wine bar. The fact that it was packed on both of our visits means they’re getting something right. But we're going to give them a few months to sort themselves out before we go back. MR