Dragon Boat Palace Restaurant

For Yum Cha you can’t go last this place mon to sun it is always busy and cheap and the selection is epic. Been eating here for 20 years.

Recommended this yum cha place by our shuttle driver and found it without an address even– at the beginning of China town in central Melbourne. Clearly very popular with a near full capacity restaurant and it was a big space. Very cool all you can eat deal that comes with a complimentary wine.
We managed to get through a decent amount of dishes between the two of us. Including the Char Siu Bao– yum steamed buns stuffed with barbecued pork, Stuffed Eggplant and Siu Mai (Siew Mai, Shu Mai) — those steamed, basket looking dumplings with filling sticking out from the top (ours had shrimp and pork filling). Also got the Pai Gwat; Pork Spare Ribs in Chilli Black Bean Sauce amongst others. Egg Custard Tart (Dan Ta, Dan Tart, Don Tot): their baked tart with egg custard filling for dessert. Decent tasting and lots of choices on carts wheeled around by staff.
Worth checking out if you are feeling like dim sim.

Terrible, scallops weren’t actually scallops. Should have known better, but it was cooked terribly
Menu stated Beef fillet with pickled cabbage, boot leather. Both served cold
Not recommended at all.

I only came here as part of a tour group, but I would never voluntarily come here.
In summary: Bad food and bad service. Worst Chinese food I’ve ever had… Don’t come here!
The waiters are rude and too lazy to service you.

Pretty good value Yum Cha, didn’t get any rude staff members or bad food. Some of the dumpling skin may have been a bit tough but the food choices were plentiful and quite nice.
There seemed to be a lot more english speaking people at this one compared to others, would probably come back again but the CBD spoils us for choice!

The yum cha is very ordinary, but edible. The range of desserts is limited, but the usual mango pudding and sago in coconut milk are enough for me. Service is slow especially for tables far from the kitchen on a busy day. Sometimes, it’s even necessary to personally walk over to the storage cabinets to get chilli sauce, etc.
All of these shortcomings are more than compensated for by the unlimited quantity of food, for just $ 17 per person. So set aside 2 hours for lunch, come with an empty stomach and feast till you drop.
«Quantity has a quality all its own»: — Joseph Stalin

All you can eat for $ 17.
You get what you pay for… I find the waitresses friendly however food of varying quality. I find if you get there around 12:15pm weekday lunch you catch the «wave» of decent food from the kitchen — seems to be prepared in waves.
It’s not flash however I find a lot of the Yum Cha in the Melbourne CBD isn’t as good as it is out in the suburbs.
Oh, Minh — FYI the Dim Sum/​Yum Cha differentiation is purely cultural — for some reason it’s called «Yum Cha» in Brisbane/​Melbourne/​Sydney where as you call it «Dim Sum» in the US. :)

I used to go for yum cha with my parents every Sunday back in the Bay Area. We didn’t call it yum cha, we called it dim sum, not to be confused with dim sim.
Dim sum is a style of Chinese food eaten for brunch or as a light meal. There are various small portions of food, including dumplings, potstickers, shaomai, springrolls, and bau, served in steamer baskets or on small plates. In Cantonese, going for dim sum is known as yum cha, which means «drink tea» — the connection is that tea is usually served with dim sum.
We were on Lonsdale Street for lunch and decided to have yum cha when we walked by Dragon Boat. All you can eat for $ 20? I’m there! I was excited to have the yum cha experience because I hadn’t experienced it yet in Australia.
The Dragon Boat experience was quite disappointing. Yum cha should be about the food and the food was below average and very salty and oily. I’m sure there are good yum cha places, but Dragon Boat clearly wasn’t one of them. Although, it was very similar to my previous dim sum experiences — large tables filled with families and friends and servers manoeuvring their way through with trolleys — the food just didn’t stack up.

I gotta agree with the other reviews here, Dragon Boat Palace is a tad on the disappointing side when it comes to yum cha.
They do have a great all you can eat special here, and at first glance (it’s under $ 20) it seems like a good option. We decided to hit it on my birthday one year (what better way to celebrate than smashing out some dim sum and a few beers in the early afternoon). The food circulates so slowly here, and the dim sum wrappers are so stodgy, that what you end up getting is dense and on the cool side of tepid. There’s nothing wrong with the service really, except they try to palm off the same tired and cold dishes rather than wowing with inventiveness and fresh hot food.
There seems to be a bit of a culture of mediocrity when it come to yum cha in this city and it makes me sad. Dragon Boat, while not the worst I’ve had, just slips into that ‘going through the motions’ kind of attitude and it’s unacceptable no matter how cheap the deal they are offering.

Despite Victoria’s long Chinese history (we actually coined the word ‘chink’, which isn’t exactly something to be proud of), there’s actually not a whole lot of Yum Cha-​style lunches. Not that I’ve found, anyways. In fact, the Dragon Boat’s the only one I know that does it the way I remember it from back in Canberra: trays of bamboo containers, with everything inside from tripe to fried wontons to barbecue pork buns.
And it’s nice enough when you’re after a change — a friend of mine used to come down from Bendigo with her mum to visit her grandmother and have lunch here. Thing is, though, nice is as far as I’d go. It’s not brilliant, just good enough.

On the face of it, there could not be much better than the prospect of all you can eat Yum Cha for under $ 20. Carts of delicious Chinese specialties brought round and you just indulge, and then indulge some more. That was the lunch special we had at the Dragon Boat Palace Restaurant.
But the reality was very different from what we’d hoped. The food was really greasy, bland and left an odd sickly feeling in your stomach. In short: I would not be back ever again.
I even got heckled by a friend from Hong Kong who saw me go into this restaurant. The next time they saw me they joked at my mistake.
Concept=brilliant. Execution=terrible.