China Tea Club in Lyneham is a fancier Chinese restaurant – plush carpet, linen tablecloth, and more sophisticated furniture than your regular cheap and cheerful Chinese spot. I have only dined at China Tea Club once, several years ago, and honestly don’t remember it. So when there was a 50% discount deal on the Fork app for China Tea Club, I got some friends together and booked a table for dinner.
We’re greeted when we walk in and shown to our table that has a lazy susan in the middle since there are 5 of us. There are several attentive staff in uniform ready to assist if required.
We try the chicken sang choi bao ($18 for 4 lettuce cups) which is flavoursome, hot, crunchy and comes with a generous portion of filling.
The stir fried king prawns and scallops with asparagus ($27.50) looks great, but I find the prawns lack flavour and haven’t had time to absorb any of the sauce. The asparagus is crunchy, and there are more scallops than expected.
The King Island steak with honey and pepper sauce ($24.50) is super melt-in-your-mouth tender, comes in large chunks and is smothered in sauce. Everyone’s happy with this dish and we could easily order it again.
The BBQ roast duck in plum sauce ($21.50) is disappointing – dry and mostly bones. It’s not really worth mentioning.
The bok choy with mushrooms is cooked well leaving the stems of the bok choy with a bit of crunch. Both enoki and Shiitake mushrooms are provided and a very generous portion at that.
The Singapore style Balmain bugs ($32.50) come swimming in a sweet and sour sauce, with zucchini, spring onion, capsicum and extra tang coming from the pineapple. The bugs are easily peeled out of their shells and there are 6 shells between the 5 of us.
Apart from the roast duck, we enjoyed the dishes and it was a satisfying meal for all. As mentioned earlier on, the set up is nicer than your regular cheap Chinese joint, so China Tea Club could be a good date night idea as it’s also quiet. Staff are attentive, our orders were taken promptly and read back to us, and the food came out quickly. The restaurant was only half full on a weeknight, so we could chat for as long as we wanted without any pressure to vacate the table.
China Tea Club
7 Montford Cres, Lyneham
Opening hours:
Monday to Thursday: 11.30am – 1.30pm, and 5.30pm-9.30pm
Friday to Saturday: 11.30am – 1.30pm, and 5.30pm-10.30pm
Closed Sunday
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