Dessert bar sweetens the deal at the new Chat Thai, Circular Quay

Chat Thai, Circular Quay: land of firsts. It's the first Thai canteen, for instance, serving natural chilled red wine behind the bar.

It's also the first Thai restaurant on the harbour offering a whole Thai dessert bar offering four flavours of sticky rice and tangled little nests of Thai style rice noodles which you can sweeten to your own taste with house-made coconut milk, coconut sugar and tender slices of fresh young coconut.

It's definitely the first Thai restaurant in Circular Quay I'd actively be excited about returning to.

And I'd do so for the dumplings on the menu alone. Khao kreab pak mor translates as garlic chives and pickled bamboo, lightly swaddled in a steamed rice flour skin. Dip into the soy fermented chilli sauce at will. Rinse with a glass of Les Tempes Des Cerises, and repeat.

Or forget about repeating and make your way straight to the almost marshmallow-like pork and prawn dumplings, fluffy and glutinous and covered in coconut shavings. Drench 'em in salted coconut milk for best results.

Interestingly, there's a Vietno-tilt to the menu here. A bit of a deep dive towards the back of the carte turns up bak kut teh – that classic medicinal pork bone soup – as well as a Thai version of banh xeo.

Here, the classic street dish of a thin, crisp turmeric-stained coconut pancake is filled with sweet pork floss, peanuts, tofu, green onion and a side of pickled cucumber relish.

But to my mind, the thing that really sets this particular Chat apart (owner Amy Chanta now has six, with the Randwick branch celebrating its 27th birthday this year) is that dessert bar.

True enough, the Westfield branch do a fantastic line in Thai sweets, and it's hard to look past the late night banana fritters at their Haymarket digs, but here there's a real concentration on the savoury end of the sweet spectrum.

So maybe it'll be four different iterations of sticky rice, from a pandan-scented version topped with a finger of custard, to another covered with lurid prawn floss, and yet another sporting fine shavings of salted fish and fried shallot.

Despite the fact it feels like we're reaching peak "hey look! Messina/Zumbo are opening a new store in another mid-range shopping complex!", Circular Quay has long been a dead zone when it comes to pre-show dining. I can only imagine the queues come Sydney festival. Bring on summer.