All-You-Can-Eat Yum Cha for Dinner / Unique Experience in Sydney

Yum Cha is typically considered a lunchtime meal but there is a restaurant in Sydney called Chef's Dynasty Yum Cha that has decided to defy the rules and not just offer Yum Cha for dinner but in an all-you-can-eat format.

Let's Feast!!

First up was the cart that contained what I call the more 'interesting' dishes so chicken's feet, tripe, pork ribs, eggplant / prawn and the less traditional dim sum.

I chose Chicken's Feet, for anyone who doesn't eat a lot of yum cha this is a dish you either love or hate. It's got a lot of tiny little bones and contains mostly skin (no lean meat at all). I love it but actually started to regret ordering it as I had to eat all 6 on my own...(my friend didn't want any).

We also took the liberty of ordering the Stuffed Eggplant - eggplant is one of my FAVOURITE vegetables and I love the way it's so tender in this dish and drenched in that blackbean sauce. Perfect accompaniment to the prawn meat!

To our pleasant surprise they didn't just have dim sum, they also offered a number of dishes that would usually be considered 'special' and charged at a much higher price. One example we chose were the Pippies in XO Sauce. Sauce had great flavour, pippies were a little too room-temperature for me but sometimes that's what you get when it comes to yum cha as the carts are constantly being wheeled around the room.

Next up we had Prawn and Spinach dim sum and the more traditional Prawn dim sum (har gow). We also had Siu Mai but I forgot to take a photo and it was so-so tasting anyway!

We then opted for a plate of the Prawn Rice Noodles (har cheong fun) - the rice noodles were nearly translucent, delicate and perfect texture for me. I really enjoyed this dish and pretty much ate it all by myself ;)

Getting full...but we soldiered on

So after eating multiple plates of the steamed stuff we started to move onto the fried carts...

We ended up choosing some Soft Shell Crab and also some Hom Sui Gok which I always call the "football shaped dumpling" but it's basically a fried thick sweet pastry with some pork mince inside. We also got the prawn sesame dumplings (no photo) and were just about to call it quits.

Until of course we got second wind and started ordering desserts...

Some Egg Tarts and also Fried Taro

Last but not least we finished off with some refreshing Tea-flavoured Jelly

Did we get our money's worth?

Honestly, probably not. We were pushing our limits here and I usually eat less than this at a normal yum cha outing but it was definitely worth the money in terms of the atmosphere, the 'prospect' of being able to eat as much as you can and actually the variety really surprised me.

They've changed the format now so that it's self-serve instead of the carts and it's also 10% more expensive too so I don't think I'll be coming back as that'll be nearly $40AUD/pp which is A LOT to spend on yum cha - unless of course you're a big eater!

Anyway, let me know what you guys thought, what are some of your favourite yum cha dishes?

Bonus points for anyone who can tell me how many dishes we ate ;)

@phamished xx

P.S. Sorry for the horrible quality photos, I just had my phone on me as it was an impromptu trip.