Golden Lily

"Went for Dinner at Golden Lily and the food is delicious. The seafood (abalone & fish) is prob the best I've had in Melbourne. I would recommend to family and friends."

"Good dim sum choices, nice ambiance, weekend busy noisy place, manager can be quite rude when handling walk in customer, however you are allowed to dine within 1 hour time. Other staff quite humble. Can pay park at the opposite ie Boxhill Central. Worth to visit."

"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 with the price."

"I recently visited this restaurant but unfortunately, I was disappointed with my experience. The food was pretty ordinary and didn't stand out to me as anything special. What bothered me the most was that the restaurant had a strict 1.5 hour time limit for dining, which didn't allow my friends and I enough time to fully enjoy our meal and chat. This policy made us feel rushed and uncomfortable, and it greatly affected our overall dining experience. While the staff was friendly and accommodating, I don't think I will be returning to this restaurant in the future. I hope they consider adjusting their time limit policy to allow their customers to fully enjoy their meal without feeling rushed."