Great little cheap eat in Footscray with generous portions. Dumplings are above average and handmade (chilli could definitely be more chilli though) and the handmade noodles are my favourite - great bite and a must get every time. The owner is also lovely!
I love this place. Great homestyle and authentic food.
We have been many many times and keep going back.
The Stir Fried Shredded potato is amazing- highly recommend.
The cucumber salad was our highlight, it's perfectly spicy and cooling, and goes so well with fried food. Dumplings were more subtle in flavour than the Shanghai ones elsewhere. Lamb skewers were fantastic, perfectly rendered and salty morsels. It's not fancy, but the staff hit a good point between efficient and accommodating, and the food is great.
Cleanliness has never gotten between me and a good meal – I am from Malaysia, after all, where I grew up on open-air dining in a humid, tropical city and its accompanying creepy crawlies (I’ll stop there because I want people to get hungry reading this review) – but Northern Chinese Footscray stalwart Dumplings & More is nothing like what Zomato reviews suggest. Could the restaurant have cleaned up its act in the last few months? Perhaps. Was my cutlery wet? Yes, but at least I knew they’d been washed! Was the restaurant grimy and dirty? Far from it. It was plain and bare, yes, and I wouldn’t nominate its interiors for Best Restaurant Design, but I was pleasantly surprised by how clean it was after reading the ghastly Zomato reviews.
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My score 4 stars. J & I had lunch here on Thursday 4th of April. We had been here before & had Vego dumplings, Tofu skin salad, & Eggplants in Sichuan sauce (a cheap, huge, but quite sweet dish).
This time we swapped the Eggplants for Fried Lamb noodles (now $12) > Handmade noodles were plentiful & quite chewy (but in a soothing way) 👍. Thin pieces of lamb were soft & flavoursome, but not “fatty or muttony” – the sauce was similar (so J could eat some). It also had celery (quite small pieces, a big tick 👍), bok choy, a little bit of onion & tiny bit of tomato. Gravy was nice – you need to mix it around to make the noodles moist & slippery. Only chopsticks were supplied, so the long noodles were a bit hard to eat “daintily” - don’t order if you’re on a date!
Vego dumplings (still $9.80 for 15) > Really good 😋. Nice flavour & filling – exotic spices (maybe some cumin, but subtle so nice). Quite different from most places (in a good way). Wrapper dough thick & a bit chewy, but in a nice way. A bargain 👍!
Tofu skin salad (still $3) > Tofu sheets softened in some sort of salty chilli dressing (but still chewy) with carrot pieces. Unusual (for us) & quite moreish (I would prefer some of the carrot to be smaller, but J liked them). Bargain for the amount 👍!
Free 👍 tea was tasty & had no trace of bitterness 😋.
Overall > cheap, no frills, out of the ordinary (Northern regional) Chinese food – good dumplings & noodles. 1 woman seemed to be doing everything, service was ok, some language issues, but she was pleasant & we all got round it. We had to take away about ¾ of a TA container of noodles, as there was too much food (for $24.80 👍). If you’re fussy about ambience, spotlessness & silver service – give it a miss. If you like to wing it/slum it/eat good cheap food – give it a go. The vego dumplings by themselves are worth a return visit 👍👍👍!
Food is great here but the service lacking. We had tonight the pork dumplings, beef with pulled noodles, Shaolin bao dumplings and mild lamb skewers. They were all delicious especially the pork dumplings with the crispy fried side. Cumin flavoured lamb grilled skewers were also tasty with the fat rendered off to a crisp and the pulled noodles were just right and light on the oil. However the Shaolin bao list all its juices meaning it quite dry. Service was very bad tonight as it seemed like they were under staffed.
Would return just for the food.
very cheap and great quality for what you get. The fried lamb noodles are really really nice. It’s got handmade noodles that are nice and chewy. It’s a bit oily though. The cucumber salad is very refreshing.
The xiao long baos here are really good!- the skin is thin and soup is super flavoursome. I also like the mince pork and green beans dish. These two dishes go well with each other. I found the skin on the steamed and pan fried dumplings a bit thick for my liking. Overall would give 3.5 /5 I’m so happy that there’s a place close to home to have good xiao long baos!
Cute, cheap and cheerful. Service is always the same and it has a lovely dumpling house vibe. Always really enjoy the food here and would recommend to anyone who loves dumplings.
Great food, order the Chinese broccoli and prawn dumplings. Its cheap. And staff are super friendly. Have been here a couple times and will continue to return.
This is one of my favourite dumpling spot in the West.
There dumplings are really nice. My usual order is pan fried pork and prawn with chives dumpling. The lamb skewers are also really nice.
Got to say the stir fried noodle is the star, they got the smoking flavour in noodle.
The service was good but I didn’t give them a 5 because the server had no understanding of English. Luckily my partner can speak Chinese otherwise it quite difficult to communicate with her.
Went here to try authentic Chinese dumpling and can say that it didn't disappoint me. We ordered 4 different types of dumplings and the service was quick as we were the only ones during that time. The sauce given with the dumplings was also good.
Would recommend the place if you want to try authentic dumplings at a cheap price.
My favourite dumpling restaurant! If you’re not fussy about the service, this is the place to be. Food is extremely authentic and reminds me the food back in China. Service can be slow when the restaurant is packed out but it’s totally worth the wait! Recommended dishes to order:
Prawn & pork with chive in chilli oil
Stir fried shredded potato
Lamb skewers (if you like lamb)
Fried noodles with pork or your choice of meat
Delicious, authentic tasting dumplings. Was a bit nervous as decor etc weren't as 'amazing' as other nearby restaurants. Although food, value for money and overall experience made up for this perfectly. Will definitely be back !!
Great place for dumplings and so cheap. We first ordered the spring onion pancakes and they were nice and crispy and flavoursome. We they progressed to the star attraction being the dumplings and ordered a serve of the fried pork and prawn with chives and the steamed pork dumplings. Both had great flavour and complimented nicely by the chinese broccoli with garlic and oyster sauce. The brocolli was so good that we ordered a second serve. This place needs a makeover but i guess the prices are so cheap due to the no frills environment. It was a hot night and we asked for the aircon to be put on at the front of the restaurant (like it was at the back) but for some reason this request was denied. Food great but not a fan of the space or the service as very little interaction with our waiter.
This place is amazing, it looks like a dodgy brothel but the staff are very nice and they make the best dumplings ive ever had. Take home dumplings and byo. They dont charge enough for what they serve up
This used to be my go to Dumpling place before I moved away. The service can be tricky as some wait staff struggle with English but it is an awesome place to go out & get dumplings! They're always quick with service, the prices are cheap & the food is always top notch. Only complaint is I wish they had a saltier soy.
Grumplings and more
I rolled down the road hungover
Feeling less than sober
Dumplings are a must and there's nowhere good that's closer
Prawn and chicken
Let's get chopstickin'
Clocks are tickin'
Boxes ticked and
I'm finger-lickin'
I have one small complaint
What's wrong with old mate?
He wears a grumpy face
Gets annoyed at my mistakes
I'd poured my sauces in the bowl
Unknowingly I'd crushed his soul
The tiny cup is meant for tea
And old mate went mad dog at me
Sad to see
Cause the food was as rad as rad can be
This was my introduction to Dongbei food from the Liaoning Province of China.
I went with a friend of mine, who is from that particular Province and he promised to only order very authentic food to that region.
To me, the star dish was Pork with Sauerkraut and Glass Noodles. Being locked in between North Korea and Russia, this dish made perfect sense to me. I could seriously eat this all day every day - it was simply divine.
The Lamb Skewers were a treat too - you must eat them while they're hot. They're covered with all sorts of spices, but the one I could taste predominantly was cumin.
The Dumplings were nice, but nothing special. They did have a good flavour and, once smothered in chilli oil, we demolished them in minutes.
Same as most dumpling joints, there is complimentary tea.
Note: My friend warned me to use the tissues provided to wipe the table and every utensil or plate :-)
Nowadays dumpling places are becoming trendier but the dumplings are not as tasty and not as cheap. This place reminds me of those good old days when authentic dumplings were cheap, rustic and rare finds, served in some ancient "sticky" Chinese restaurants hidden in some narrow laneway in Chinatown. Very filling but very inexpensive. Will try the other dishes next time.
Been here many times! Awesome food! Always fresh and cooked well, every thing we have tried has been great. Service is friendly meals normally come out quiet fast although you can wait when they are busy. Only let down would be the walk past the kitchen to the toilets if it is raining outside. But worth it for the great food!
Do yourself a favour.
Fried vegetarian dumplings.
Green beans and pork mince.
Potato, eggplant and chilli.
Best dumplings I've had in Melbourne.
No pretence, just humble, mouth-watering deliciousness.
It's the place to go in Footscray if you're looking for good xiaolongbao.___________________________________________________________________
Been coming here for years and never had a bad dish. It's a very basic restaurant which could do with a makeover, but I don't come here for the ambiance. The hand made noodles are as good as I have ever had, with a beautiful chewy texture and great flavour. The veg dumplings are just as good as I Love Dumplings in Flemington. Spring onion pancake is a nice side dish. Cheap price and good food = winning.
One of my favorite places to eat. If you want squeaky clean you need to go somewhere else, but if you want super cheap, delicious and fabulous food, this place is rad. You can be served in five minutes or an hour - it's a lesson in zen. Fried pork dumplings, cucumber salad, lamb skewers and pork and fungus are so good I don't want to deviate, but I've never been disappointed. You'll never leave hungry, and it's insanely cheap. Four thumbs up
An authentic northern Chinese menu with a range of dumplings, stir fry dishes and noodles. Great tasting food and generous portions. For entree we had two cold dishes and dumplings: seaweed with seasonings and dried tofu with fresh carrot and seasonings, and boiled chive and pork dumplings. For mains we had potato and pork, sweet potato in "toffee" and stir fry hand cut noodles. My favourite is the sweet potato - make sure you let it cook before eating as the toffee is quite hot!
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As a general rule of thumb with budget Asian restaurants, the dingier the place, the better the food. Of course, I run the risk of unfair stereotyping and yes, there are always exceptions, but this has been my personal experience eating in Australia and overseas over 20 years. Dumplings and More fits this cliche perfectly. A little grungy Chinese place on Footscray's main stretch of Hopkins Road, it serves up mostly mainland northern and west Chinese cuisines; we're looking at meat dumplings, handmade noodles and Uighur-influenced grilled skewers. Pull up a chair and tuck into some handmade lamb noodles and you can't go wrong. The noodles were perfect texturally, "al dente" and slightly chewy. It had been stir-fried with lamb slices marinated in cumin and peppers. The meat and sauce were very tasty, though on the salty side. We also had stir-fried chicken pieces with soft bones which was excellent; the "bones" being soft cartilage were edible and gave the pieces a mildly chewy texture. Again, very well-seasoned and tasty but salty; which is fine by me. Dumplings and More isn't going to win any design awards, its tables are well..a little "sticky" and service slow and haphazard, but overall, the food is of a high quality and easy on the wallet. A meal here for 2 would cost you less than $25 and you'd be bursting at the seams at the end of it. In summary, a great cheap eat, but lower your expectations on ambience and service. A lot.
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Just a warning to germaphobes: this place is slightly sticky. And by slightly sticky, I mean the tables, cups, sauce bottles etc are all sticky. They also use ridiculous amounts of msg (extreme thirst and headache kinda amounts). If you can get past that, then read on.
I definitely recommend ordering the fried lamb dumplings for something a little bit different. We also ordered the boiled pork dumplings, which were less impressive. They had definitely been frozen and were slightly dry in the middle.
We ordered the stir fried pork belly with potatoes, which was doused in a delicious soy-based sauce with notes of star anise. Then was crispy eggplant and potato coated in a thin coating of rice flour then deep fried, and tossed in a thick sauce. It looked deceptively bland, but was actually really flavoursome (the msg).
Next were the lamb skewers, done in traditional Chinese street-style, coated in five spice. They were moist and delicious, and not dowsed in MSG.
I felt slightly sick afterward, both from the MSG and also because I ate too much because it was so delicious, because of the MSG. First world problems.
Great spot. I eat here once a week, sometimes twice. I have been coming here for the last 4 years and the food is consistently very good.
It's not a flash place, think home cooked northern Chinese food (the Chinese name means "Little Northern"). Try the gum bao gi ding or the green beans with pork or the stir fried potato or the potato eggplant chilli dish or, if there are enough of you, all of them. The dumplings are also great
Great place for dumplings and noodle dishes jammed packed with flavour.
Service there is not so swell as all employees have poor english making it very hard to communicate your needs.
However they do try their best to help understand you. :)
This place is almost a religious retreat for us. Like any good Chinese restaurant it is chaotic, but is very friendly below the surface. It's cheap, quick and yes oily! That's why we go back. Steamed or Fried Vege dumplings are simply addictive, we have to get both, with Spring onion pancake, green vege (bok choy in soy) and fresh celery and peanut salad. We lay the chilli oil on thick with soy and indulge. Visiting family insist we go there now, and we are more than ok with that.
The menu is very deep, but we can't bring ourselves to venture to far from these staples. I wanna go now
We were just walking past Dumplings & More and decided to go in after looking at the menu, and it proved to be a good decision.
Festivus - awesome dumplings. The dumplings rock!
Flavour, flavour & flavour
Cheap too ;)
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Chuffed. Having made a booking for one 3 months in advance i was outraged to discover Dumplings and More had plenty of tables available with perhaps only 60% of the restaurant being occupied on a notoriously busy Tuesday evening,
Although being greeted in a friendly manner the staff seemed confused and bewildered by my incessant complaining and disbelief at the lack of a helipad on the rooftop to accommodate my gold plated Marine One chopper,
My subsequent whinging about having my pilot land at whitten oval then enduring a mind numbing 3 minute ride in a limousine down Barkley street to their establishment left them speechless,
To make matter more uncomfortable I was left standing at the table like a ninny waiting for the chair to be pushed in behind me so I could be seated, further more the waits staff seemed more interested in adeptly taking other tables orders, serving their food punctually and attending to patrons bills than of fitting my shirt and lap with napkins which to my horror I realised were a box of common tissues ,
After perusing the menu extensively and confirming with the chief via the waitress several times that hawk chops marinated in armadillo sauce is not available even on insistent special request I settled on the chicken noodle soup which I devoured puncingly over a long period of time at first complaining that it was too hot then by the end that is was cold,
Of course the cutlery supplied was unacceptable to me due to its socio/metallurgic properties so I used a solid silver spoon given to me by my father and to him by his father and so on and so forth,
To wash things down and top off the night I greedily guzzled down a $1000 bottle of champagne from my private collection which went straight to my head,
At this point It was way past closing time and I was the last person in the restaurant, I barely heard the weary staff members polite requests for me to pay up and leave as I was engaged in a heated and patronising rant to a statue in the corner about poor peoples pathetic ineptness in entering Australia's wildly over inflated real estate market,
All up I greatly enjoyed my dinning experience at Dumplings and More and as reluctant as I was to pay the bill (I tried haggling) I did so begrudgingly without tipping,
Although the lack of helicopter facilities and the absence of critically endangered species on the menu was disappointing the staff were friendly and the food was freshly made, authentic, cheap and top notch,
I'm already looking forward to returning.
Thumbs up !!
Jackson Fletcher-Coon
+4.5
Been eating here for years and will continue to for years to come. They have arguably the tastiest and cheapest dumplings in Melbourne. Once you start exploring their menu though you really start to see how traditional their food is.
Dumplings & More? I personally can't get past the dumplings to try the "more" because the dumplings are so divine!!! An absolute Footscray gem. The only suggestion I would make is perhaps more service with a smile. Aside from that, definitely worth a visit.
Don't be fooled by the decor- the food is brilliant! You could close your eyes and open them, and feel like your in dodgy restaurant in the middle of an Asian city! The fried homemade noodles are delicious in both chicken and seafood.. Dumplings are great - up with the best I've had! Service is quick if you can get back the lack of English communication. All in all, great experience, cheap prices and yummy food!
Addictive Flavours!. So addicted to the food here that we're slowly becoming regulars! The Cucumber Salad is a refreshing way to start, with a good mix of salt, tang and spice, along with the Deep Fried Shredded Potato which just melts in your mouth. The Lamb Skewers are coated in a thick layer of herbs, amazing. For the mains, the Eggplant in Sichuan Sauce and Spicy Chicken with Peanuts are both a must-try. However, what's great about this place is that most dishes can be ordered along with rice for just $8 and the portions are HUGE. Such quality food at such low prices, the place is always busy!
The most amazing dumplings in the world! And so cheap. Lovely people that run the restaurant. Basic interior but such good food. I'd eat here every night if I could.
Must try the Hand Stretched noodles .. Pronounced "La Mien" .. Fried dumplings are great too .. And nearly all dishes under $10 !!
Great veg dumplings. Lovely people. Unlike some similar places they take customer service seriously. It's a bit of a barn early in the week but it rocks on the weekend.
HUGE serving of delicious home made sea weed salad and being a meat eater I'm not a huge fan of vegetarian dumplings but these were awesome!
If you want know what is real kong bao chicken, you better try is place! All the kong bao chic in china town are fake! This place make the REAL Chinese food! Only problem is they need to improve their cleaning!
As Ms Baklover mentioned, the cold dishes are fabulous: shredded potato with chilli, celery and peanut salad, pickled cucumber with garlic, tofu skin salad. (And also 'tofu sheet' salad. After twenty visits I still mix them up. I think the 'tofu skin' is better - that's what they recommend.)
And the people are *so nice*!!!
I will overlook a multitude of sins for just another of Dumplings & More's lamb skewers.
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