Shanghai Street Dumpling, La Trobe St Melbourne

 Fried pork mini buns ($8.50?)

Veggie dumplings in chilli oil soup

 Pork XLBs $8.50

This is another of our old faithfuls. There are now at my count three of these around the city, the original on Little Bourke St, this one and one in Chinatown. This is our favourite to go to simply because it's the quietest—while there are frequently lines snaking outside the door of the other two, here it is usually easy to get a table perhaps due to its slightly removed location and the large number of tables the space holds. Nonetheless the quality is definitely up to scratch with the other two locations. The service is always pretty nice too, which isn't always the case with these uber cheap Chinese restaurants.

We always tend to over-order here because we want to get a variety of things and it's so cheap! Not so great if it's just two people eating though because we usually end up with a lot of leftover food. Would definitely recommend coming here with a table of four or something to make the most of the experience.

On this visit, we showed some restraint and only ordered three dishes: the fried pork mini buns, the pork xiao long baos, and vegetarian dumplings in chilli oil soup. Everything was super delicious and we even got close to—but didn't quite succeed—finishing all our food. A word of warning though, be super careful with the XLBs and mini buns because they will squirt scalding soup in your face/eye/hand/tongue; the trick is to carefully pierce the skin first to slowly drain some of the soup and let it cool slightly. Even with some care taken you will inevitably get at least a mildly burnt tongue, but hey, that's half the fun.