Lilong by Taste of Shanghai Rhodes — Restaurant in Sydney

I’ve dined at other Lilong restaurants before but not this one. The experience here overall wasn’t great.

This particular restaurant has a strange promotion where if you leave them a Google review, they gift you a free entree worth $8.80 The problem is they don’t tell you explicitly what the exact entree is but the post shows a photo of the actual dish you get for free. It’s extremely confusing. When I tried to reason with the staff that I ordered the black & white swan pastry also valued at $8.80 and if we can substitute it, we were refused and that the cold pickled cucumber dish as shown in the photo was the only entree dish they give for free. It felt very misleading.

My husband asked the staff if the black & white swan pastry contained any filling, the female waitstaff said “no”. Much to our surprise, the black one contained what tasted like taro filling and the beige one was custard. They were nice but a bit oily as they were deep fried. The staff clearly had no idea.

The football-shaped dim sim was disappointing - the filling wasn’t exactly the traditional mince pork but contained minced pork with corn. Very odd as it wasn’t the traditional way I was expecting. The appearance also didn’t look like what was depicted in the menu.

The Shanghai croissants were alright. This also tasted quite oily and very hot in the centre so be careful when eating it! The filling felt a bit sparse.

Yangzhou fried rice was fine although the prawns shown in the menu appeared much bigger than in real life.

The Wagyu Beef was the star. The black pepper sauce was superb and always to gold standard like every other time we’ve had it.

The customer service here is non-existent with very little staff on the floor during peak times. It was hard to flag a staff if we had any questions.

Overall, we are not likely to return to this particular Lilong due to other restaurants in this centre we...

I expected a busy rush for Chinese New Year but the wait staff lack of attention and how slow the food took to be served really left a bad taste for us.

We ordered about 7-8 dishes to share between the 4 of us and the timing between each dish is very slow served one after another. Our rice came much later after the meat dish was served. Their kitchen system is a mess and we were there for 2 hours and by the 5th dish we were already quite full and ended up cancelling our last dish.

There were only 1 front lady and 3 wait staff serving the whole restaurant so I understood the challenges they were facing caused by the lack of staff in general.

Up until this point, our experience was okay until this server with an attitude started to talk rudely to us. We were served soup without a serving spoon or individual spoons for the table to which we tried to look for ourselves but ended up getting the wait staff attention. She came back with one spoon and walked off and we quickly asked her for the other spoons.

She responded with an angry face “Why didn’t you say you wanted 4??!” as she stormed off. I immediately called her out as it is common sense to want spoon to eat our soup?? She gave me an unfriendly stare, brushed me off and walked off.

In her agitated and super annoyed mood, she came back with a fork….(you really can’t make this stuff up…) and stormed off huffing and puffing when we said we need spoons…🤦🏻‍♀️

I saw other reviews mentioning a girl with an attitude and not sure if it’s the same person but that interaction was enough to not make me want to ever come back. It feels like she had a bad day and was taking it out on people. I don’t know what her problem is, but she needs more training or if she hates her job that bad, just quit

Reason why I’m bumping the rating to 2 and not 1 is because the...

To celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival, we visited Lilong in Rhodes—a restaurant under the Taste of Shanghai dining group. As I have explored a couple of venues from this group, I must say, Lilong stands out with a notably high standard compared to its sister restaurants. A highlight of the meal was the pan-fried pork bun. Unlike the traditional Shanghainese version, Lilong uses yeast-based dough, giving it a unique texture. However, it still retains the juicy meat filling inside, bursting with rich soup. I would rate it a solid 100/100—absolutely a must-try. We also tried the basil wagyu beef. While the flavor was pleasant, the wagyu was unfortunately overcooked, which made it a bit tough to chew—missing the melt-in-your-mouth tenderness one expects from wagyu. Another dish we ordered was the diced chicken with chillies. The taste was good, although they’ve clearly altered the cooking method. Instead of the classic sichuan style dry, fiery version, the chicken resembled popcorn chicken—crispy but not spicy at all. That said, since Lilong focuses on Shanghai-style cuisine, it’s understandable that the spiciness level is toned down. In terms of ambiance, the restaurant features subtle Shanghai elements in its décor, adding to the cultural atmosphere. Pricing is very reasonable, especially considering the quality of the food. One small area for improvement: dessert was served before the rest of the meal, which disrupted the dining flow. It would be great if staff could confirm the serving order with customers, even when using the now-common QR code ordering system. While convenient, this method can reduce personal interaction, making the dining experience feel a bit impersonal. Overall, Lilong offers a satisfying and culturally resonant...