Tao Tao House 陶陶居

Yuuhooo~~ It's saturday!! What else to start off a good weekend with a good brunch! We had Dim Sum this morning afternoon in Tao Tao House located at Glenferrie, it's one train stop away from our place so we took a 20 mins morning afternoon walk to there instead. Actually we had been craving for Dim Sum since last week but when we were there on a Sunday around 12.30pm, it was full house and we weren't able to get a table, we were told to go back at 2.30pm ==" What are we gonna do for 2 hours with a hungry stomach so we end up having english breakfast at a nearby place which was quite good. Will be blogging about that soon but today let us share with you our happy and satisfied Dim Sum brunch experience in Tao Tao House =D

Chili Chicken Dumpling

Pork and Prawn Siu Mai

Vegetarian Spring Rolls

Spare Ribs in Black Bean Sauce

Stuffed Bean Curd

Char Siu Pastry

Mini Custard Egg Tarts

The Mini Custard Egg Tarts were AWESOME!!! The best egg tarts that we've had in Melbourne so far! It was sooooo goooood that we ordered two plate and left us still wanting for more after consuming three each. It was fresh and HOT out of the oven, we both burnt our tongue just because it was too tempting and we cannot wait any longer to get a taste of it xD

Shanghai Pork Dumpling (soup filled dumplings)

All the dim sums were very good except for this Shanghai Pork Dumpling aka Xiao Long Bao, sad to say that it's the worst that i've(Ms) had. To make a good Xiao Long Bao, the skin, it's meat filling and soup filling are all equally important, i've heard that even the fold count at the top is also a part of what makes a very good Xiao Long Bao. Back to this particular Xiao Long Bao, no comment on it's meat and soup fillings BUT, the skin is...yucks. It should be tender, smoother and somewhat translucent but it is not, it felt like wet-supposingly-fluffy-white-buns which is thick and mushy. Also, from the picture you can see, one of the dumpling's skin has split so where's the soup filling? Gone =(

Nicely decorated interior

Pu Er Tea lovers

The place is not as spacious as you see from the pictures above, it's actually small and cramp. There are only two carts circling around the restaurant and the time frame that they serve out dim sums from the kitchen takes quite a long time so base on our experience in Gold Leaf, don't expect dim sum carts to keep coming to your table every few minute. This is slightly hard to accept at first cause we were used to getting whatever we want the moment we sat down in a dim sum restaurant and next minute our table will be full of dim sums so we can dig in to fill our tummy. So, we had to keep waiting for new dim sums to come out and that is a bit frustrating as we were both very hungry.

The bill came at the price of a total of $62+ for nine dishes (average of $6~6.50 for one dish) and a pot of tea. Honestly we weren't expecting this much as the average price for a dish in Gold Leaf was about $4, oh wells.. what you paid is what you get. At least eight out of nine dishes we had was pretty good so we don't mind paying more for better qualities dim sums (sigh..imagine how many dishes of dim sums we can have back in Malaysia with the amount that we're paying now, ($6 x 3) / 3 x 9 =54 dishes!) 

Oh! Do make reservations in advance. We can't even get a table for Sunday 1pm when we called to make reservation yesterday so remember to call and book before going to Tao Tao House! We learnt our lesson by getting turned out at the door with empty stomach and that does not feel good at all.