Golden Lily — Restaurant in Melbourne

Dimsum restaurants are difficult to review because they have to do a lot of dishes well. Golden Lily does not push carts around, instead you order by ticking boxes on the menu. Advantage of this: food arrives hot and perfect. Disadvantage: you have to know what you are ordering, which may be difficult if you are not familiar with the dishes. A menu with photographs would help, but a look around the restaurant (which was full on a weekday!) showed 100% Chinese clientele. So they all knew what they were ordering.

Pork and Prawn Shumai 5/5: Golden Lily sets the standard here. This is probably the best Shumai in Melbourne. It is big, moist, fresh, and the shrimp is firm. Shumai's have to be made an optimum size - if it's too small, the ratio of pastry to filling will be off, so pastry has to made thinner and the Shumai will be more fragile. If it's too big, you can't make the pastry too thick. Golden Lily's Shumai is on the bigger side of optimum, which means more meat and less dumpling skin. You decide if that's a good thing, but for me I would have preferred them slightly smaller.

Fried Whitebait 5/5: The batter is really light - look at the picture. You can still see the fins of the fish. It is crispy with little balls of crunch. My guess is they used a tempura style batter, meaning very cold and deliberately slightly undermixed. Fish inside is soft. Not oily. It is perfect.

Hum Sui Gok ("Salt Water Dumplings" or on the menu, "dumplings with pork mince") 4.5/5: pastry was a bit too thick for my liking. Generous amount of great tasting filling. Nice contrast between slightly crisp outside and soft inside.

Durian Puffs 5/5: these are AMAZING and a must order. Durian flavour is quite intense and I think there is a lot of real fruit in there.

Bean curd rolls 4.5/5. Would take 5/5 if not for the fact that other restaurants do better versions. This one is very good, but not the best. Filling is nice and moist.

Egg tarts: 3/5: Disappointing. If you look at the picture, you will see that the custard has sunk in the middle. This is a sure indicator that the egg tarts have been baked too early and sitting around for too long. The custard sinks because the water from the custard is absorbed by the pastry, which means dry custard and wet pastry. It could be amazing if it was fresh from the oven, but ours wasn't.

These dishes were OK but not amazing: lotus leaf glutinous rice (average, 3/5), beef tripe (needs more ginger and freshness, as it is it is too heavy - 3/5), chicken feet (it's OK but needs to be steamed more - 3/5),

And the only bad dish: the white radish cake. I give this 1/5. Look at the picture and you can see it's dry with too much batter and not enough radish.

Tea was $3.50 per person! The tea was quite good though.

As for service, it appears that there's only one guy collecting menus and punching orders in. It took a long time to get his attention. Otherwise, empty dishes were cleared quickly and we did not have to wait too long for the food.

Make sure you eat fast because you will lose the benefit of freshly made dimsum otherwise.

Despite the 4/5 review, this place is really worth visiting. Some of the dishes are outstanding. What lets it down is the price, some of the dishes are substandard, and too many of them are average. If you pay this much you should have amazing dimsum. To get 5/5, they need to rethink some dishes and provide food and service which is commensurate...

Recommended by our friends who love yumcha here, we experienced some of the best roast duck in Melbourne.

The duck was exceptionally tender, with even the breasts remaining moist, which is often rare. We were so impressed that we ordered a second duck. It was only AUD$52.

We also enjoyed the honey-glazed BBQ pork and the crispy roast pork belly. Portions were quite large too.

However, we found the portions of the oysters with 3 kinds of wine claypot and eggplant pork mince clay pot to be too small for their price.

The custard buns with salted duck eggs were a highlight, with the custard running out upon biting into them.

They also had complimentary desserts & fruits afterwards.

It's no surprise our friends love coming here for yumcha despite the 30-minute drive.

The interior ambiance was delightful, and we look forward to trying the yumcha here next time!

2nd visit here for the yumcha, prefer the dinner better.

Below were the dishes we ordered.

Good dishes: Deep fried durian cake 貓山榴槤酥 Spiced salt white bite fish 椒鹽白飯魚 (Portion quite big for the 2 of us, best shared) Pork dim Sims with caviar 魚子燒賣 Custard buns with salted duck egg 黑金流沙包

Dishes that were ok: Steamed ox tripe 沙嗲牛百葉 BBQ pork pastry 蜜汁叉燒酥 Chives dumpling 鮮蝦韭菜餃 Deep fried taro with pork mince 蜂巢炸芋角 Steamed rice roll with prawn 鮮蝦腸粉

Dishes that we won't order again: Fried white radish patty 蘿蔔糕: It was $8.80 per plate, I didn't even finish 1p/4 of it as it just tasted bad. Steamed glutinous rice in lotus leaf 八珍糯米雞: It was steamed for...

ORIGINAL REVIEW Came here for yumcha on a saturday around 1:30. Easy to get a table. Restaurant is nice and clean, service is friendly and attentive. Food was tasty though a tad expensive but the quality was great! 4 star rating originally.

EDITED REVIEW 15/03/2021 I kept my original review above for reference. This restaurant is no longer what it used to be. We arrived on a Sunday at around 2pm and waited 10 minutes for a table which was ok. However, this is where it all went downhill compared to my original review. The seats were in dire need of a steamclean, as there was old food stains all over it in the weirdest of places. We ordered 5 standard dishes off the menu and waited 35 minutes for the first to arrive! The other dishes took another 30 minutes to arrive, and was either cold or tasteless. We were then told the one dish which we originally came here for was not available about an hour after we arrived.

Before I went to pay, I badly needed to use the restroom, and hey presto the bathroom was absolutely trashed, messy and unkept. There wasnt even any toilet paper for me to use- you know the feeling when you badly need to use the restroom and you finally get there but theres no toilet paper? COME ON MAN at least scatter some toilet rolls around the place i'll put it on the holder myself I dont care.

anyway, they billed us incorrectly as well and tried to charge us for the dish that wasnt given to us. Forget it. Not coming back. If you do come here, bring your own toilet paper because aint no one going to help...