Yum Cha Cafe

Tea and service pretty good, food was well below par. $ 8.80 for three thick and ripped xiao long bao, very disappointing ‘prawn dim sum’ and bland sticky rice. Would not recommend.

Yum Cha Café is kinda like a Disney-​esque version of normal yum cha. The café is decked out in a cutesy-​cool oriental style, and is clearly trying to set itself apart from the rest of Chinatown’s yum cha restaurants by being a fashionable, more expensive alternative.
A big give away for sub-​par yum cha is a lack of Chinese patrons, so I had alarm bells straight away with Yum Cha café. Some of the dishes were quite authentic like the shu mai (pork and prawn dumplings) and ginger prawn, but others like the pork buns were very ordinary.
Because it’s so much more expensive than standard yum cha joints in Chinatown I expected to be stuffed by the end of the meal, but I wasn’t. Because it’s relatively small, there weren’t as many dishes on offer as you’d normally find, so once we filtered out the ones we’re not a fan of we were left wanting.
In future I’d prefer to spend less and get better food and a more buzzing atmosphere at either of the Shark Fins or Westlake…

On the corner of Exhibition Street and Little Bourke Street, right at the end of Melbourne’s Chinatown is this elegant café. After exploring the city my wife and I felt like having a late lunch and exploring some interesting tastes. There were plenty of people with the same idea and the café was almost full.
The service was excellent and the dim sum trolley kept on coming out of the kitchen at regular intervals. There were the usual dim sum dumplings and tarts, of course, but what was exceptional were the dumplings wrapped in deep fried seaweed and the ones made to look like little fish — I didn’t think that I would encounter a ‘disguise’ outside of a medieval cookbook.
I love a good cup of tea and trying different varieties of teas and the Yum Cha Café’s tea menu allowed me to do that with an excellent Oolong. The café’s décor is attractive and stylish to match the food. It was such a good-​looking table with all the dishes and teapots on it that I had to take a photos of it.