The second you enter Tiger Lane precinct you’re surrounded by bright neon lights, bold colourful signage and cool music, says dining reviewer WENDY JOHNSON.

In the centre of Tiger Lane is a massive, central bar and scattered here, there and everywhere are food outlets, including hawker-style eateries. Tiger Lane – Canberra’s Pan-Asian dining precinct – is all action and fun. 

We headed in on a Monday night to graze our way through Chinese, Japanese and Cantonese dishes. 

At Tiger Lane, you can order your own full meal or adopt our approach, which was to share dishes so we could eat together. We first wandered through the lane to get a feel for our eatery options and then ordered a bottle of Alpine Road pinot grigio from Gapsted Estate Wines, Victoria, a lovely drop ($42.76). 

Our food adventure started at Inari Express with the amazing gyoza piping hot (six pieces for $10.90). These super moist Japanese dumplings were packed with finely minced pork and spring onion. The dough had just the right “bite” and wasn’t too thin or too thick. We dipped them into salty soy sauce. 

We’re massive duck fans and so made a beeline for Lucky Duck BBQ. Our half-duck and two serves of pancakes were $39 and came with everything needed to “make your own”. The duck was succulent and bold with flavour. The pancakes were soft and amazingly thin. As usual, slices of cucumber added crunch, and the hoisin sauce was savoury, sweet and smoky.

Steamed dumplings were next on our foodie adventure, from Golden Panda. Sensational were the crystal skin prawn dumplings (six for $15.90). They were juicy and flavourful with the prawn meat carefully wrapped in slightly translucent (“crystal”) dumpling skins. 

Also from Golden Panda, we ordered Shanghai soup dumplings, a first try for a couple in our group (six for $15.90). These little gems have hot and slightly salty soup inside, although some weren’t as soupy as we would have liked. 

Still a wee bit peckish (hard to believe, I know), we found ourselves back at Inari Express for an eel skewer ($9.90) and chicken skewer ($6.90) to share. 

The eel was wonderful. Melt-in-the-mouth and great with the Yakitori sauce. The chicken was tender and also great with the sauce. 

Also from Inari Express we ordered tempura. It wasn’t our fave dish of the evening… the batter wasn’t as light and crispy as we expected. It was a generous serve for (19.90), however, and covered all the bases with prawn, sweet potato, pumpkin, eggplant, and okura (okra). The renkon (lotus root) chips were fun. 

We were getting pretty stuffed, so we gave other hawker-style eateries a miss – Blowfish (sushi), Sticky Beak (fried chicken) and Supalove (Thai). Another time, for sure…