Shanghai Street Little Bourke — Restaurant in Melbourne

This place is usually crowded, luckily when we went there, they had some table is available. Later, we saw many people get in line waiting for the tables. Luckily for us haha.

The space isn’t too big, those tables are near to each other. There is a free self serving drink courter (tea and water) at the back. So that you don’t need to order more drink, we wish we know it before. The tea is hot and suitable when eating Chinese food usually has many oils. We ordered the chrysanthemum tea 🫖 and in my opinion, the free tea is much better.

The food is good, we’d love Kung Pao chicken dry noodles 🍜. There are some dry chili 🌶️ as decoration but don’t worry it’s not too spicy. Soup dumplings 🥟 we ordered a bowl had 15 pieces and definitely each dumplings is quite small haha, can’t expect anything better.

Even we’re quite full, we decided to order extra Xiaolongbao with pork filling. Tbh, it’s quite disappointed 😔, we saw many recommendations on gg map and it’s not too good. The layers outside of this xiaolongbao is quite thick so it’s not easy to break by the chopsticks 🥢 and drink the soup inside.

Services are accepted, foods were delivered quickly, the staff...

I would never take a fellow Chinese person here. I’ve been here twice for dinner and would not go back. Both times the queue was long and they make you order while you’re still in line. The food arrives very quickly (within 5 min of being seated) and the service is fine, however the food is just not worth it. I’ve had the Shanghai noodles with pork and veg, pan-fried pork buns, stir-fried green beans with pork mince, cumin lamb noodles, fried rice, stir-fried mixed veg, and beef brisket and tendon claypot, while dining with non-Chinese friends who wanted to try this place. All the dishes are beyond oily and the skin on the sheng jian bao (pan-fried pork buns) is extremely thick. This kind of food would have been acceptable in the 90s but we have many better Chinese options in Melbourne now. I was embarrassed that my non-Chinese friends were exposed to this. I do have to say that out of all the dishes we had, the best was the beef brisket and tendon claypot. The tendon was delightfully gelatinous and the chunks of tender beef were very generously-sized. I also liked that the claypot used whole cloves of garlic which were braised wonderfully in...

Unfriendly staff and below-average food.

I walked in yesterday asking for a table of 3, but the staff told me to stand aside and wait outside (under the heat of 35 degree) because my other 2 friends were still on their way even though they have empty tables and seats both inside and outside. It was not peak hour and they were definitely not busy but somehow it was impossible for them to offer me a seat while waiting.

When we finally could sit down, one of the waitresses brought out utensils and stuff and she literally SLAMMED them on the table which made a loud noise. We were extremely uncomfortable with her attitude, not to mention any customer service which doesn't exist here.

We ordered xiaolongbao, wonton, marinated duck and fried rice which were all average. We specifically asked for warm duck, but we were served with something that was room-temperature outside and very cold inside.

The experience was so bad that we didn't have the mood to take any pictures. Just not worth it.

The only good thing is that their portions were pretty generous. But overall, we definitely will NOT come back and do NOT...