High-end restaurants get a taste for delights of yum cha

"If yum cha's on the table I can't stop eating it," says Dan Hong, executive chef at Sydney restaurant Mr Wong. "It's that one mouthful of pleasure you get from a dumpling that's just so awesome. I don't think I could live without yum cha."

Yum cha is an old Chinese tradition where the drinking of tea is accompanied with "dim sum", the collective term for dumplings, spring rolls and other snacky steamed and fried things.

For many Anglo-Australians, yum cha has also long been a hangover cure native to western Sydney leagues clubs and Chinatown dining rooms with peach-coloured walls. However, there's a trend of high-end restaurants coming to the yum cha party and offering top-notch dim sum that's priced accordingly.

China Diner and China Republic opened this year at Bondi and World Square respectively, serving dumplings in uber-swank, mood-lit environments. Merivale's Mr Wong started its yum cha opening hours on Saturday and Neil Perry's Spice Temple Sydney launched a yum cha menu in July. Both restaurants were awarded two chefs hats in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide 2015.

Don't expect trolleys of chicken feet and deep-fried yellow things clanging around the room at these places, as everything is made to order. Spice Temple, for example, serves fried tripe with "heaven-facing" chilli salt and egg custard with snapper crab and XO sauce. Of course it has dumplings too.

Spice Temple launched a yum cha menu at its Melbourne outpost two years ago.

"Our customers have been asking for years when we were going to do the same in Sydney," Spice Temple head chef Andy Evans says. "Plus people are loving dumplings right now, so the timing has been perfect."

Hong says Mr Wong started offering yum cha from 10.30am to midday to cater to Chinese customers who like to go for dim sum early.

"The grandmas and all that who don't come for the whole Mr Wong experience. They eat and they leave – they don't want to start with dim sum and finish with mains and dessert."

Hong also points to another reason for the earlier opening hours. "If you want me to be really honest it's also about the extra revenue," he says.

This motive isn't out of step with Chinese tradition.

"Yum cha, as we know it, does not occur in northern China where they just drink tea," Martin Che Chung Young says. Young is a guide for Taste Food Tours and hosts walking tours of Eastwood's Cantonese street food.

"It took off in the south mainly because the southerners tend to be more enterprising in their attempts to make money."