Mr Wong’s @ Sydney (2025)

Not many restaurants I kept going back to, and Mr Wong’s is one of them because of its popularity among my Aussie friends and colleagues.

Mr Wong’s is a very popular Chinese restaurant in Sydney, serving Cantonese (and more recently) and Szechuan fare with a loyal following among the local community. 

Layered with timeless colonial furnishings including timber floors with tiled inlay, bamboo framed French woven chairs and slow turning ceiling fans, Mr. Wong pays homage to classic Chinese influences in a contemporary style. Seating 240 people over two levels and serving a selection of up to 80 dishes, it’s a big affair.

There’s plenty to see in the two-level dining room, from the Shanghai colonial-era accents to the glassed-in wine cellar where staff ascend a ladder to reach the bottles above. Yet somehow the restaurant still manages to feel intimate, with nooks for two, dim lighting and moody jazz.

Mr. Wong does Cantonese-style food, breaking some of the traditions along the way. At the helm is Australian-Vietnamese executive chef Dan Hong, who brings his energy and creative flair to the kitchen.

As you are ushered into the restaurant, you will walk past their line of ducks waiting to be roasted. Barbecue ducks are a crowd favourite (they have a whole room dedicated to them), which is also served like Peking duck if you like.

Roasted crackling 5 spice pork belly

I used to love their roast pork belly, but this time I was saddened that it was no longer the same. The crunch was gone, the pork was under-seasoned.

笋尖蝦饺 King prawn and bamboo shoot Har Gau

I enjoyed this reboot of the classic hargau (prawn dumpling) and IMHO Australian hargau are the best because of the sweet prawns that they have around the waters here. I loved the crunch of bamboo shoots in the hargau, wonderful match.

小籠包 Xiaolongbao pork soup dumplings

This was a new item on the menu, the Shanghainese Xiaolongbao. I was disappointed it came cold, so everything else doesn’t matter anymore. And no shredded ginger and wrong type of vinegar was served.

Chinese roast duck

The local critics gave high praises for their Chinese roast duck. Mr Wong sure knows how to roast a duck. Beside the open kitchen, the birds hang raw and resplendent in a glass display, quietly awaiting the five-spice and roasting treatment. They arrived shiny and crisp-skinned, with an excellent fat-to-tender-meat ratio, primed for rolling in pancakes with cucumber and hoisin sauce.

Pippies wok fried with XO sauce

The classic Chinatown dish, live pippies with fermented black bean & chilli, has been given an upgrade with XO sauce. Unlike the previous times I was here, they had succumbed to adding a glug of cornstarch to the final step of preparation, which in my opinion is essential to make the sauce stick to the pippies.

‘Char siu’ roasted Glacier 51 toothfish, pickled ginger, radish

Glacier 51 toothfish, also known as Patagonian toothfish or Chilean sea bass, is a highly prized fish known for its snow-white flesh, delicate texture, and rich flavour. Here it was grilled like a piece of charsiu pork, and the result was this neon-red piece of fish with excellent fattiness and a wonderful charsiu caramel on the outside.

Kung Pao Eggplant

This next dish wasn’t on the menu, perhaps a new dish that they were trying out to see the acceptance of the audience. It’s like Kung Pao chicken, but instead of chicken, they used eggplant. The eggplant took a bath in boiling oil, leaving its skin crispy and the inside mushy. Then it went through the kungpao treatment. I quite liked it, the eggplant wasn’t soggy with oil. But it is difficult dish to maintain this standard all the time.

Twice cooked green beans with pork mince & XO sauce

Twice-cooked referred to first blanching the French beans and then sautéing the beans with the minced pork and XO sauce. So the trick is to not get the beans too soggy and yet thoroughly cooked so that the “beany” taste is gone. Wokhei was there on the surface but the beans themselves were quite tasteless.

I have been coming here for over 10 years, the food has not changed much and I am getting quite bored about the menu. The dim sum selection has gone off tangent to the regular ones in yumcha restaurants, but in a good way. However 5 variations of hargau still makes it a hargau. Given the lunch crowd, they still have a huge following, but not many Chinese clients these days. I came because my Aussie colleagues picked it. There are much better Cantonese restaurants in Sydney.

Mr Wong’s
3 Bridge Ln, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
Tel : +61 2 9114 7317 (Reservations)

Visited May 2025