Where to Eat Yum Cha in Melbourne When You're Feeling Like a Bottomless Pit

You know it’s going to be good when you’re venturing right into the middle of Chinatown. Tram down on a weekend and you’ll immediately encounter queues for various restaurants, all merging into each other higgledy-piggledy. Trust us, though, it’ll be worth the frustrating crawl up Little Bourke to get to Crystal Jade.

Fast trolleys, fresh food and good service make this CBD restaurant worth spending your Friday night at — add to that a decent wine list (with offerings from places like Margaret River as well as Italy) and you’ve got your weekend dining bonanza sorted. And Melbourne’s best karaoke joints are around the corner.

Image: Kimberley Low.

Yum cha over at David’s in Prahran is no joke. Open on Saturdays and Sundays, the light and airy space plays host to some serious dim sum situations. Pick your time (12pm or 2pm on Saturdays, and 11:30am or 1:30pm on Sundays) and shuffle in with some mates and an empty tum ready to fill.

Opened by David Zhou almost 20 years ago — and starting out as a small tea store on Chapel Street — this reincarnation of David’s knows its prawn dumplings from its pork buns. Specialising in country Shanghai food, you’ll be grazing away and throwing down dumplings as fast as they come out (remember to chew). Go for unfussy, chill vibes and stay for the fact that the food doesn’t stop coming — it’s bottomless, and they deliver each dish at lightning speed.

A rare combination of a store, teahouse and Chinese restaurant, Oriental Teahouse is a unique experience. Come for both food and drink options, as the eatery — another of David Zhou’s forays — puts just as much love into both. Thirty-eight different varieties of tea are sitting pretty on the menu, some for accompanying dumplings and some for just sipping on their own.

Despite the concentration on tea, don’t be fooled — this is a full-blown Chinese restaurant and a beaut option for yum cha in Melbourne. It has an extensive dumpling menu with additions like chilli wagyu beef, ginger prawn, and roast duck. There’s even steamed white chocolate dumplings for dessert. Don’t fill yourself up with the tea options too much – you’ve been warned.

Red Door is more than just a yum cha restaurant. In addition to tasty Cantonese food, the eatery is also an antiques store full of treasures — and it has a beautiful decor to sit, sip tea and down dumplings in. When you enter Red Door, you feel a little like you’ve travelled back centuries in time to China instead of having just stepped off Chapel Street.

Sitting up the Windsor end of a quiet side street, Red Door is peaceful — no trolley service here, just pre-order off a menu. There are good gluten-free dumpling choices for those who generally miss out on the tiny bundles of goodness and ample vego options, too, and everything you sit on is for sale (so sit carefully, we guess).

Collingwood’s Shu is famed for its regularly changing ten-course vegan degustation and its more experimental five-course version. But on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the Shu crew changes things up by running their bottomless plant-based yum cha experience.

For a very reasonable $55 per person, the table gets two hours of endless dim sum dishes that are all totally vegan. The taste so good that even the most staunch meat eater will be happy. And if you feel like making it a boozy affair, you can always add on free-flowing alcohol for $45.

Up the Parliament end of the city sits Secret Kitchen. At its entrance is one of the largest restaurant aquariums in the city — those swimming fish seem happy and there’s a high chance that you’ll also leave Secret Kitchen happy, too. Adding to their branches in Glen Waverley, Doncaster and Chadstone, the restaurant owners have completed the quartet with their Exhibition Street digs.

Here they specialise in seafood — and something called a lava bun — and the restaurant is also fairly good value for money for the CBD. They also serve adorable sweet red-bean buns that are decorated to look like little pigs. Eat your heart out.

Editor’s note: Secret Kitchen is renovating its site and won’t reopen until Sunday, June 2. 

Gold Leaf has a couple of very important drawcards, and mostly it’s the fact that there is more than just one of them for your convenience. With outlets in Preston, Burwood, Springvale and Sunshine, it seems likely that whatever far reaches of Melbourne your weekend might lead you to, Gold Leaf will feed you up nice and good. Thirty years old and smashing out delish Cantonese food since way back then, Gold Leaf has more dumpling options than you have fingers to count ’em on.

Make your way here when you’re really hungry and ready to roll, and expect tasty, fresh fare. Just make sure you save room for a custard tart or six for dessert.

Balaclava’s Moonhouse is home to some of the best yum cha in Melbourne. It’s also one of the few dim sum haunts that offers bottomless booze. Drop by Moonhouse on a Saturday or Sunday to nab the $59 endless yum cha that cycles through 12 different dishes — think XO scallops, chicken and prawn wontons, roast duck pancakes, char siu pork buns, salt and pepper calamari, and prawn dumplings. There’s also a totally vegan option for the plant-based diners out there.

And if you feel like making a big party out of the whole affair, you can add on unlimited alcohol for $45 per person. Beer and wine are all that’s available, but the Moonhouse crew isn’t pouring the cheap and nasty stuff. Get around a Hop Nation pale ale, Stomping Ground pilsner, the pinot grigio from Mandi in Mildura and an MDI Friulano skin contact number.

The sandy side of town has some offerings for yum cha, too, so don’t be thinking it’s only about Chinatown. Part of the restaurant precinct on Fitzroy Street, Mahjong has been serving up scores of dumplings for nigh on ten years. Head in any day of the week to build your own yum cha feast, from a huge range of dumplings and classic dim sum dishes.

But if you’d rather let the team decide what you’re eating, you can order the set menu made up of a whole stack of yum cha bites as well as some larger dishes. It’s not traditional yum cha like most of the other spots on this list, but it is damn delicious.

An oldie, but a goodie, Shark Fin Inn now has restaurants both in the inner-city and suburbia, leaving you in very good hands when that dumpling craving hits. Expect white-clothed tables, dapperly-looking waitstaff and a yum cha service with a truly devoted following of regulars.

The menu is a roll-call of classics, with pork siu mai, glossy har gow, xiao long bao and vegetarian dumplings all making an appearance. Elsewhere in the lineup, you’ll find pan-fried pork dumplings with a golden crust, crispy deep-fried wontons, and juicy prawn dumplings bathed in ginger broth. And that’s only about one-third of the options. If you’d prefer to have the choices made for you, banquets ranging from $55-59 per person are available

Located within The Espy in St Kilda — one of Melbourne’s best pubs — Mya Tiger is a contemporary Cantonese restaurant with one of the best Sunday yum chas in Melbourne. For $60 a head, you get three starters and can pick six different dim sum dishes. Choose from spicy pork wontons, prawn dumplings, BBQ pork buns, truffle pork siu mai, soupy xialongbao and a heap of other classics.

You can call it quits there and leave fairly full, or go all out by adding on some duck pancakes, noodles, fried rice, teas and cocktail teapots. And if you miss the Sunday arvo yum cha, we highly recommend you stick around and order the roast duck banquet that’s only available on Sundays. For just $39 per person, you get a glass of bubbles and a selection of duck-filled dishes. It’s a cheap and easy way to end the weekend.