Rhodes Phoenix
Cuisine: Chinese, Yum Cha

www.phoenixrestaurants.com.au

Level 5, Rhodes Shopping Centre
Off Homebush Drive
Yum Cha - Mon to Sat, 11am - 3pm
Sunday, 10am - 3pm

It’s my birthday! Well it was my birthday, and what a better way to start the day than with YUM CHA!

Do not be fooled by stories of unimpressed diners of other phoenix restaurants, Rhodes Phoenix was one of the best Yum Cha restaurants I’ve been to in Australia. There are a few Phoenix restaurants in Sydney, and we passed on in Manly that looked tiny and had heard that the food at others was not so great. But Rhodes Phoenix is a very large restaurant and does not feel as cramped as some other places offering Yum Cha. You do not feel as though carts are going to crash into you every 2 minutes and your chair is not pressing against the chair of the person behind you, making getting out of and into your seat an intimate challenge.

I had read a few comments about the restaurant, people complaining about service and speediness of the food. But there are a few things you should really know about Yum Cha to make the most of your experience. The first is not to expect 3 star or 3 hat hold the chair out while you sit down service. This is not what Yum Cha is about. The restaurant needs to serve a very large amount of people all at once, and very quickly, so that even more people can come in. At peak times there can be up to a 45 minute to 1 hour wait outside, so the many wait staff there do not have time to have a long conversation with you, in fact they will say as little words to you as possible. But its okay, its all about the food!

Secondly, if you want the best choice of food, then don’t go there at 2pm if the service stops at 3pm. I’m not sure I’d even go at 1pm. My personal rule with Yum Cha is to go before 11.30pm at the very latest. This will mean a shorter wait (although you can still expect to wait up to half an hour or 45 minutes if its a very popular restaurant). 

Our aim was to get to Rhodes Phoenix before 10.30am but we managed to get there at 11am. Still not so bad, and we were told we only had to wait 30 minutes. We grabbed our ticket and decided to go look at some shops to kill time. We came back about 25 minutes later and went up to the counter again to check if our number had been called (sometimes if you do this it will remind them that you are there and sometimes you can get a table sooner, but its really pot luck). We were then seated straight away and didn’t have to wait more than a minute for a cart to arrive.

We found that there were a lot of carts at this time of day and they would pass us quite a few times. If there’s something you really want and you can’t see it don’t be afraid to ask for it. They may seem abrupt or busy but if they can, they will help get it for you, after all they want you to eat as fast as possible so they can turn the tables. So enough of my defence of the Yum Cha culture, here is the food!

Deep Fried Dumplings with a prawn filling.

I was very impressed with the variety of dumplings available, no typical har gow in sight, and they were all very tasty. Your cart hostess will explain the different fillings to you, just ask!

Prawn and something dumplings, I forget what it was.

Again I think this was prawn meat with vegetables on top.

Fried Calamari, very nice. And I did notice that everything was nicely fried, not too tough and it looked like either we got the right day of the week or something like that because you could tell everything was fried in fresh oil.

Yes, it was my fault this was eaten before I took the photo. I was very hungry and this is one of my favourites at yum cha. Prawn paste wrapped in a bean curd skin and deep fried. Mmm.

More dumplings, I think this time it was prawn and pork meat with some vegetables.

Baked pork buns!! Yay!

Steamed BBQ Pork buns… mmm. Everybody loves these.

These clams/pippis were something different as far as my yum cha experiences go. They were very nice and I ate most of them.

Delicious fried pork belly, with a wasabi mustard sauce. I preferred to dip mine in the sweet sauce from another dish, or just have it plain.

Pork ribs in yummy sauce.

These meat balls were nice except that we poured vinegar on them thinking it was soy sauce and it overpowered the flavour.

Dessert time!

This is one of my favourite yum cha desserts, the mango crepes. They are crepes filled with cream and pieces of mango. So cool and tasy. The crepes here were a little too floury for my liking, but the mango and cream helps you to quickly forget.

We waited a very long time for this dessert. It was served out of a hollowed out watermelon and we had let the cart pass a few times before we decided we were ready for dessert. If you are even half way through your meal and the dessert cart comes by, its a good idea to just get your dessert then and let it sit waiting for you on the table. This will save you considerable time waiting for it later. Finally we decided we’d go after the cart ourselves but a waiter came by to ask if we needed something so he went after it for us instead.

This watermelon and grass jelly dessert was really nice, and even more tasty when we asked them to give us more sugar syrup! Mmm, delicious.

Overall it was a lovely meal and I would definately go back again. Check it out if you are ever in the area and if you eat too much you can do what we did which was to walk it off with a trip around Ikea.