Lee's Yum Cha — Restaurant in Newcastle-Maitland

When Lee's Yum Cha first opened it was amazing! Absolutely the best yum cha in Newcastle... but over the years it has steadily declined. My family went there for Mothers Day lunch today and the service was amongst the worst I have experienced. Despite a huge number of staff being rostered on, the trollies were few and far between, we struggled to flag down a waiter to order food - and ordering drinks was next to impossible. My husband ordered drinks for the children and before we could order for ourselves the (older female) staff member had run away, when she returned she threw a jug of water and glasses on the table and went to run off again, when I called her back to ask if I could order a drink she barked at me that our tables drinks had already been ordered and tried to run off again, when I said no, my husband and I wanted to order drinks she rolled her eyes at me, her whole body sagged and she huffed out loud. When I asked her if there was a problem to order a drink she said no, but you already ordered, she begrudgingly took our order with such an air of impatience that we did not feel comfortable to order another. We had to repeatedly ask for sauces that had been forgotten with our meals, when our children asked for forks - more eye rolls and again they were literlly thrown on the table. The wait staff were so so rude that we burst out laughing - it was comically bad. Add to that the standard of food has dropped significantly ... what was amazing is now mediocre at best. Pretty sad to say I don't think that we will be back after today. Sub-standard yum cha and being treated like an inconvenience as a customer is where we...

We have been waiting for this yum cha place since before Christmas and finally it opened. Try it today but full of disappointment. Firstly, the service was pretty bad. We understabd that the restaurant was busy during weekend but the service needs to be better. We have to ask several staff just to get a jar of water or soy sauce. Besides that, we try to communicate with one of the waiter that we havent received our food but he can't understand of what we said. Luckily, I know how to speak in Mandarin which help the situation. Mention of time of waiting, we have to wait for almost 2 hours for our food. But we left without getting all of food. We have 4 out of 7 order that we ordered. Then we have to go somewhere else to fill up our tummy. We also see another couple doing the same thing. Now talking about the food. It is disappointing too. We have dim sum (taste frozen and dry, look like has been out for a while), spring rolls (oily and you can see the dolly paper is full with oil), fried noodle (the flavour is Ok But I think they use the wrong noodle. It suppose to be egg noodle but taste like vermicelli noodle). The saving grave was the fried dumpling. It was the best thing we ever had for today. The dumpling was oozing with soup and yumminess. In conclusion, we don't know if we will be there again...

I would only recommend if you love extremely poor and rude service. Took along time to received any food and the food was average. Order the stir fry fillet beef in peeking sauce which is on the menu although we didn’t receive this (more like rainbow beef) instead received battered crumbs in a sweet and sour sauce in pineapple which certainly isn’t what was on the menu or what I would call a stir fry. The stir fry mix greens were also not what was advertised with the green (yes green as in 1 type) steamed not fried. Even the drinks were confusing we order Coke and Coke Zero but got a mixture of cans and glass bottles. We mentioned we didn’t received the items ordered the server seemed confused and what I assumed was the manager came over asked the same question and checked the receipt taped to the table. At this point no apology but was told it wouldn’t be much long as my table thought it would be out next but no. We waited almost an hour watching table after table received their orders. After waiting over 2 hours we had to cancel the rest of the order. At no point did the restaurant apologise or try to make amends. We paid the bill (in full) and left hungry. On exit we were asked if we had paid our bill by the chef. Will...