Taste Gallery

Went here for lunch today instead of Little Singapore, for something different.
It was different… Service not as good, atmosphere not as good, food was very average, especially for the amount they’re charging.
It wasn’t terrible but I won’t be back. LS or Little Hong Kong next time for me!

The food was really tasty and what I thought was authentic. The service wasn’t all that great as We had to ask for chilli oil twice (our favourite addition to all Chinese dishes). Also the fact that we paid 3% surcharge on the bill for using our credit card was a bummer. However since the food was good I would go back (with cash).
Spicy Chicken — ⁴⁄₅
Xo Fried Rice — ⁴⁄₅
Pan fried Pork Dumplings — 3.5÷5
Service — ³⁄₅
Ambiance — ³⁄₅

Taste Gallery is one of the larger Asian eateries at the south western end of Market Square Shopping Centre in Sunnybank. It looks newer and more impressive than most, so two of us decided to give it a taste test for a quick light lunch.
We were greeted warmly and shown to a café style wall booth rather than one of the tables. Next time I’ll use a table with a backed chair as the strictly horizontal booth bench and strictly vertical booth back were definitely not designed with human anatomy in mind.
I marked our dish choices on a laminated order card with a provided marking pen. It took a while to hail a passing employee to take away our order. Service is cheerful but not attentive.
My companion’s stir-​fried chicken breast with chilli black bean sauce was prepared in a rear kitchen while my steamed mini «soup» dumplings and sticky rice with pork were prepared by white-​liveried cooks at the front of the restaurant, behind glass viewing windows. It reminded me of the cooking arrangement at the Din Tai Fung restaurant at Chatswood in Sydney where I enjoyed dining on two trips to Sydney earlier this year.
Typical of many Asian restaurants, food arrives when it is ready, but with no attention to patrons eating simultaneously. This is possibly due to the Asian custom of sharing dishes as they arrive compared with the Western preference for separate individual meals. My companion’s meal arrived within five minutes and he had almost finished before my soup dumplings arrived about fifteen minutes later. The sticky rice followed in a further five minutes. The food was hot and tasty. The chicken dish was amply sized although the portions of dumplings and sticky rice were less generous, with only tiny pieces of pork well hidden in the rice.
The cashier did not understand my request for a business card but then I found a pile of them on a stand in front of her cash register. Despite her poor English, she was very pleasant. All in all a reasonable first meal at Taste gallery and I will return to try them again.

Having been here before I was disappointed when I recently went to taste gallery. Despite having a booking we were seated after a group of 3 that walked in behind us. After waiting around for 15mins we had to signal someone numerous times before our order was taken. Our 2 dishes came about 10mins apart. There were 8 prawns instead of the 10 listed on the menu. The pork dish I had, had 2 pieces one cold in the centre as if it had been in the fridge. The second was very chewy.
All I can say is only order yum Cha there. The rest is very underwhelming.

Overall good quality food. A bit pricey and that makes me hesitant to come back. Everything I have tried here has been really good though. I’m not sure if the price is worth it however I cannot deny that the place does look fancy and the atmosphere is good. I would recommend anyone to just try it at least once. It’s not the best value for money so don’t go in expecting that!

While hunting for instant desserts late on a Friday night, a friend pointed at the dark and empty closed Taste Gallery and asked if I had ever been. I hadn’t, but mostly because the SO tries to avoid Sunnybank’s Marketsquare. The traffic and lack of parking on the weekends drives him nuts!
I knew if I was going to try them out, the SO would need convincing to lay aside his reservations and pray to the parking gods. Who — as it turns out — answered those prayers in 5 minutes after we braved the weekend traffic to try Taste Gallery for lunch. Score!
Whoever Taste Gallery hired as their interior decorator did a great job. The restaurant looked really modern and sophisticated with plush chairs.
We walked straight off the street and directed straight to a table without reservations and were handed 3 large sheets.
The first was a singled-​sided A4 list of beverages.
The second is a duo-​sided A3 menu with photos.
The last was a duo-​sided order sheet.
Each menu item is priced as either:
Small — AUD$ 3.50
Medium — AUD$ 4.50
Large — AUD$ 5.50
Special — AUD$ 7.50
Premium — AUD$ 9.50
Ultimate — AUD$ 11.50
I can think of nothing better for a chilli hit than a Sichuan dish. Famished, I ordered the Sichuan noodles with pepper sauce, thinking it was just a single serve.
Wrong! What arrived was a huge bowl meant for sharing. Not that I would share, as the noodles were perfect, smoothered in a blend of pork mince, peas and tofu. And the sauce was exactly the shot of spicy zing I craved. All you gotta do is slurp slurp slurp!
The SO ordered the steamed siu mai, since yum cha cannot be complete without it or har gao. These are plump and juicy, but the shitake mushroom flaour overpowered everything else.
I was first introduced to delicious by a friend at an eatery, which closed last year. The SO and I have been hunting for a new place to replace our original haunt, and we might still be looking for awhile. These pan fried pork buns are ok, but just not as flavourful as the ones we used to have. Also watch out when they arrive — they are full of piping hot soup and can squirt their contents up your nose if not careful.
The char siew bao is the SO’s favorite yum cha dish — it has to be sweet and savoury, filled with juicy pork covered in sticky sauce and wrapped in fluffy soft-​as-​a-​cloud dough. While the filling at Taste Gallery is really delicious, I couldn’t stop from thinking that the dough is more doughy-​er than the soft Hong Kong style baos I’m familiar with. It is still yummy, but was more filling than I expected.
For beverages, Taste Gallery has a range of bubble teas, but when having yum cha, you really should only be sipping hot tea to clean the palate. Tea is charged at AUD$ 1.50 per person and there is a choice between 6 varieties: oolong, pu erh, jasmine, chrysanthemum, pu erh and chrysanthemum blend, and kuan yin.
Taste Gallery’s food was not bad — simple and homely, and their service was quick, but it doesn’t have anything particularly fantastic to keep you coming back for more. Perhaps we should try their xiao long baos instead.

I love my chinese food. I love my chinese food in the s-​bank I call it with friends… and no it doesn’t stand for Southbank… it stands for Sunnybank. Taste Gallery has only just opened in the last year or so smack bang in the middle of the ever so busy Market Square.
I was dubious… yes I was, here are all these semi-​daggy but trying to be modern cramped shops selling the best food and then there was Taste Gallery. It was posh, it was modern, it was fancy… it looked like it belonged in a 5 star hotel to be honest when I first saw it.
From the see through window where you can see the staff making the desserts or the breads to the delicate manner in which they are plated really doesn’t fit the mould for your usual sunnybank food place… but I guess it works. It does. We were seated very quickly and the mini xiao loong bao (special dumplings) they were so popular for tasted magnificent. At $ 12.90 for 8 of them, the price wasn’t too bad either, expensive for Market Square though.
We also tasted the deep fried chicken with dried onions shallots and chilli for $ 13.80 and the serving satisfied 3 of our hungry mouths… the chicken was a little spicy just enough to give us a kick and there wasn’t much left on the plate i’m afraid. Having said that, there were a few bones we found still in them so that wasn’t too great.
Overall, this place is a breath of fresh air to Market Square and the owners should be damn proud of what they’ve accomplished. They did well.

Excuse the tautology but Taste Gallery is the latest Shanghainese taste sensation in Sunnybank. Well before I tried their food, this restaurant was already a talking point with their chefs lining bamboo steamers with colourful dumplings behind a large glass window at the shop front.
On my visit, I managed to skip the queue by booking ahead. Although it is a large space with a modern design, the low ceiling together with the chunky chairs and large number of tables did make us feel a little claustrophobic.
When we were seated the waitress handed us a menu the size of a tome. Fortunately, the layout made the menu easy to read and even though the menu was the size of a giant coffee table book, there really weren’t that many options.
Besides, we were mostly keen to try their freshly made dumplings.
Their signature dish is their dragon dumplings in coloured wrappers — flavoured with spinach, pumpkin and taro. Although they tasted fantastic, I admit I could not distinguish the different flavour of the dumpling wrappers at all.
Please note that this variety of dumpling is filled with hot liquid soup. The wrappers should be punctured with your chopstick to let the steam escape before consumption. This warning is written in the menu. The wait staff will most likely remind you when they serve the dish. Despite all this, I still managed to burn my tongue badly on the soup dumplings. They were just too delicious to wait and I got greedy.
This is a restaurant I’ll definitely be going back to. Their steamed and fried dumplings are sensational and when you get bored, there’s always the rest of the Shanghainese menu to check out.