Kylie and Sophie were going to write this review. obviously they didn't. Wallaby bar is tucked away upstairs from Pontoon, and below Chinta Ria at Darling Harbour's Cockle Bay Wharf, and is really just a long room with a balcony. The decor is a little odd, we think. The left-hand wall is basically a long wall in which are engraved the games and players of the last hundred years or so of Australian International rugby tests.
Unfortunately, it makes the place look more like a war memorial than a bar. THe toilets are even stranger, bringing opinions such as 'Orwellian' from our companions. To eleborate, they're just plain concrete. One of our fellow drinkers was heard to call the men's section 'like a death cell'. Which is nice.
Aside from these two weird things, the place actually isn't too bad. A trophy cabinet at the back of the room holds (replica) trophies from the rugby world, and the walls are lined with flat-panel TV screens, and an excellent
Bose sound system completes the audio-visual feast. The bar is long, the prices average for Darling Harbour (meaning above the normal pub price) and the food was good - we ordered between us, Chicken, Steak and BLT sandwich meals which were filling and tasty. The service was also pretty friendly, but then we were the only people in the bar when we first arrived.
The place is actually part of Pontoon, but we considered it to be isolated enough from the main part of Pontoon to justify a listing of its own. Owned by Green Hotels, who run Pontoon, the Clock and the Greenwood, with a similar target market.
A good one for a Rugby fan with spare cash, if you can avoid the grimmer parts of this review, that is....
Oh, and the place will be hosting numerous events in the run-up to the Rugby World Cup 2003
review by: Jason