Lotus

It’s just ok. There are fewer kinds of dim sum. But the price is reasonable. And the restaurant is designed as a ship, which is very special. This is a popular place on weekend. So if you are interested, it’s better to be here earlier.

Best dim-​sum I had in London. I loved the food here. We STUFFED ourselves and it was only 17 pounds per person, which I think is affordable for London.

One day, as the bf and i were taking a walk around the wharfs when I spotted a boat that looks like a tourist trap in china. Upon closer look, I laughed and told my bf it’s a decked out floating chinese restaurant called Lotus — wtf?
I got home and looked to see if the place was any good, and surprisingly it has quite large following on Unilocal.Could it be that there’s a dimsum place in walking distance to our place and is actually good while floating on water?
Finally I found the opportunity to drag my bf back there and have dimsum. And I overordered:
— lotus leaf wrapped chicken sticky rice (good!)
— turnip cake (great!)
— fried dough rice rolls (good!)
— curry squid (ew)
— bbq pork buns (meh)
— custard buns (great!)
— black bean pork ribs (good but fatty)
— prawn and chive dumplings x 2 (great!)
— black bean chicken feet and pork ribs on rice (ok)
The total was 43.23 GBP, including 1.50 tea charges for two ppl.
The price was reasonable, and we had to take a lot of food home given how much i ordered. The service was great and the view is amazing as you are sitting in a boat. It’s definitely going to be our new go-​to place for dimsum from now on!

Really great Chinese food, if a bit on the pricey side. Satay chicken to start with is great, served with a really nice sauce but could do with being a slightly bigger portion. For main I had the crispy shredded beef which is really really great. You can tell it’s all very fresh and you don’t feel gross and greasy afterwards, which is a plus! Egg fried rice is also nice.

I loved this place, especially the dim sum menu. For an affordable price you get tons of food and extra chilli bowl if you like spicy stuff like me.
The restaurant itself is a boat, so it’s already a good idea. I’ve been there a few times and definitely coming back again :)

This is my favourite restaurant which we have been going to since I can remember. I love the location and I love that it sits on the river-​except on a windy day. The food is really good and the service is always great

Decent Chinese food. I live close by and the barometer is always to see it packed especially with the Chinese themselves. I tried the dim sum which was good and the black bean dishes were tasty. Service was good and in typical Chinese style.FAST. Good value for money as well.

This is a solid choice for a dim sum (yum char) lunch. We usually have a craving every week or so and we walk away from here satisfied after a filling lunch. It’s good value too.
It has all of the usual dim sum favourites and items you can order off the menu. I like their sticky rice in lotus leaf wrap and they do good prawn dumplings too. The Shanghai pork dumplings need improvement.
I recommend it as a family friendly restaurant where you can bring young children and be easily accommodated.
The restaurant is uniquely in a boat moored to the side of Millwall Inner Dock, near Canary Wharf. The closest DLR stop is Crossharbour, but South Quay is also a short walk away.

Absolutely my favourite Chinese restaurant in London. So unique with its style, very traditional decorations but yet very innovative for the idea of a floating restaurant!
Not to mention the food. simply amazing! Their noodles are really the best I’ve ever tried, not overcooked or over salted. just perfect!
Will definitely come back very soon

This place is one of my favorites.
I thought SuperStar in Leicester Sq was good. well this place is GOOD and CHEAP.
MUST TRY… EVERYTHING.
personally i like the fried turnip cakes, pork ribs, pork buns, shanghai dumplings, prawn dumplings,. (i don’t know the name of all the dim sums… sorry)
we usually go in a big group and order family style~ we even invited our professor out and he LOVED it~
What i liked:
1. ambiance: the restaurant is a BOAT.
2. Beautiful view
3. FOOD is awesome

An interesting and unique concept of a restaurant floating on Thames.
Although the boat normally does not leave the shore embarking on the boat itself creates a different feeling than just popping into a usual dining place.
I visited The Floating Lotus Twice.
On first occasion it was a company dinner and I liked the idea of a round table as everyone was able to have a conversation with each other. The food was tasty and reasonably priced.
On the second occasion it was the Chinese New Year. The décor was much more lively and the restaurant was busier than normal for obvious reasons. The aromatic crispy duck was indeed aromatic and crispy and the squid starter with red chilly and spring onions did the trick as the combination of tastes created more appetite.
Despite not so enthusiastic waiting staff and an included 10% service charge the meal was more than satisfying to the palate.
All in all I’d visit again.

When the dim sum is fresh everything is really good. My biggest complaint is lack of consistency because sometimes all of the food looks really tired. At a midweek lunch I had a minced pork and aubergines dish that was really tasty. On the weekends, this place gets crowded which can make it difficult to get a table but improves the quality of the food. I couldn’t feel any rocking of the boat but I’ve heard some people complain about it. Try it out. There are much much worse places you can visit in the area.

Been coming here for a decade or so. A friend of mine from HK and his family first took me here for yum cha one sunday and it’s been a regular of mine ever since.
In terms of authenticity, taste and notably value for money it’s easily top 5 in London (along with Yi Ban docklands and JKL Chinatown).
Standard yum cha fare — har gau, siu mai, lo mai gai, hot pots, char siu bau and alike all for around 2 – 3 quid.
There can be a bit of a queue sunday afternoons, and the waitering staff arent the most attentive (though again from my experience of restaurants in HK, that’s pretty authentic also!).

One of my favourite Chinese restaurants in London. Dim sum is quite good, and very good value for money.
Service is a bit cold, but usually fast. There was one occasion, though, when our food just didn’t arrive. We have waited for 15 or 20 minutes, but nothing — not even a single piece of dim sum. When we asked our waitress about the delay, she answered in a very rude and angry manner, in a commanding tone even, that they are very busy and we need to be patient. This was highly unusual, but we complied. After half an hour, we asked another waiter, and it turned out that they forgot our order. This second waiter was the exact opposite of the first one. She was very apologetic, and she went out of her way to make things right. She swapped a few dim sum dishes from other tables’ orders to serve us as quickly as she could. We were even given a free dish, but the first waiter’s total lack of manners did leave a bad taste in our mouth.
But, to be fair, this only happened once out of many occasions, and I would still recommend the place, for its authentic, good quality, reasonably priced dim sum. Try to get a window table on the river side of the ship, those have quite nice view.

Absolutely terrible food! Can’t understand how this place is still in business. The chicken is rubbery and microwaved. Taste is bland, service is poor, and it’s outrageously overpriced for the tremendously low quality of food.

I’ve grown more fond of this dim sum place… Get their early and eat your heart out and don’t cringe with the bill, yay! Service isn’t amazing but the dim sum is tasty and plentiful so you get what you came for (food narcosis)

this is probably the only restaurant where I can count myself as a regular.
So what do I eat here? Two words: DIM SUM. (if you don’t know what this is, it’s like the Chinese version of tapas but we only have this for brunch)
Brought my sis here who has been living a couple of months in Shanghai and she felt that the dimsum in Lotus is way better than what she had over there. (granted, dimsum is from HK, but if Shanghai can’t compare to Lotus … well, that proves how awesome Lotus is, doesn’t it?)
Plus, the price is reasonable here. For a good dimsum brunch, the total bill comes up to approx. £10 per person. Compared to Hakkasan, it’s definitely a hit!
However, the dinner options here are not up to par, I feel that only the dimsum is what makes lotus so popular in the afternoons. Love the fried custard buns especially. (would recommend more but I only know their Cantonese names)
Every time someone from central London (or elsewhere) comes to visit me, I always, always bring them here for dim sum. Always. Then, when word spreads, more friends start asking and that hole in my purse starts getting bigger. Anyway, like a friend said, «in life you lose some, you dim sum.»

Sadly, I hadn’t been to Lotus in a couple of years — not because it’s bad, mind you. It just got superseded a little by Peninsula in Greenwich in terms of atmosphere, speed of service and ease to get there. Unfortunately, when we turned up to Peninsula for our Sunday dim sum, it had been shut by the health inspector! (My friend maintains that the dim sum was yummy, despite all the alleged offences…).
Anyhoo, I vetoed everyone and decided we were going to Lotus as it was always one of my favourite local dim sum places. I’m glad we did. I’d forgotten how much I like the bean curd prawn rolls here — it’s my favourite dim sum dish, and Lotus does it the best in my opinion (within London) — yes, it is driving my fourth star. There are a lot of nice dishes on the menu — the scallop dumpling stood out as well. The cheung fun was not so good (the skin is a bit too thick), but the char siu boa and the char siu so are good.
On arrival, it was sadly quiet (it picked up by about 1pm, which seems unusual to me for a dim sum restaurant). It’s a lovely setting — yes, cheesy because it’s a floating restaurant, but quite a nice view of the water front. I’m surprised that it wasn’t busier with the other main dim sum place shut down, looks like the regulars all dissipated somewhere else, but I haven’t quite figured out where!
The only real problem with Lotus is the transport — you really only have an option of a car, the DLR or a bus. But if you can overlook that teeny-​tiny fact, then it’s worth popping in at least once for dim sum.

Not going to travel out of my way to come here again.
Nothing special with the food, and the service was practically non existent!
I had to repeatedly ask for my green tea, they didn’t bring me the sweet and sour sauce for my prawn toast (again had to ask multiple times), and by the time I got my sauce and drink, my food was cold.
It wasn’t a busy night, and I would just see the waiters huddled at the front of the restaurant talking. Best to go China town, or anywhere else than here!

My friend who lives in Canary Wharf brought me here (not surprisingly, as per previous reviews).
The restaurant is nestled among some condos, and walking up to this restaurant is a rather strange experience — normally you would expect some sort of serenity in a floating pagoda type setting (in a wharf no less). Instead, there are seagulls everywhere, and really gross looking barrels of grease as you walk up to the entrance. However, the food was not too bad. For dim sum in London, it’s not too expensive. On the other hand, the quality of food here is a bit lamentable — I think you could probably find better quality stuff elsewhere in London, and even in Toronto, you would’ve found stuff like this there in the 1980s when no one had yet experimented with dim sum ingredients.
The décor inside the ship is slightly kitschy and looks like it has not be touched since the late 1980s (again… 1980s?). A nice renovation of the inside, plus moving the barrels of grease to a less conspicuous, covered area, would do wonders.

Bottom line: I have always been suspicious of waterside restaurants who have bad food because they rest on the laurels of their location, and this one doesn’t appear to contradict that belief.