Chubby Bunny

Shanghai Café

Happy Chinese New Year to all!

Usually, it’s quite a challenge finding a place to eat after the parade in Chinatown. This year, however, my older cousin wanted to have Xiao Long Bao and she knew exactly where she wanted to go to have them.

Shanghai Café is a rather petite restaurant of one floor. There is probably enough seating for 40 people or so, maybe less. It’s hard to tell under the dim lighting, illuminated only by neon tubes of mostly blue. There was a long wait, but the wait was amusing in its own right. We were right by the counter where I got to watch the two women skillfully wrap the soup dumplings. There was also a man in the same space who was in charge of cooking them in bamboo steamers.

Finally, after maybe 30 minutes or more of waiting, we were seated as a party of seven.

My relatives wasted no time in ordering 4 trays of soup dumplings.

Each steamer holds eight dumplings, each uniformly wrapped and steamed. The little buns are easy to remove from their napa cabbage-covered seating in the steamers.

We ordered the ones with some crabmeat inside. It’s hard to taste crab when pork is occupying the same place. In any case, the meat was just the right size, about an inch in diameter, and the soup was enough to overfill the spoons that they have for you.

Of course, those were just a part of our meal. We also ordered Nian Gao, stir-fried. These are little rice cakes, probably equivalent to mochi (I haven’t tried the mochi they eat in Japanese new year celebrations year.) I’m often skeptical about ordering these, because I worry about too much oil in the dish, but it turned out to be fine.

This was stir-fried with shreds of pork, veggies and shrimp. It was tasty and not greasy by any means. It wasn’t too heavy either as a dish, but heavy enough to feel somewhat satiated after a sampling.

We also ordered cold appetizers: beef brisket and jelly fish. The brisket wasn’t as tender as I would have liked, but the flavor made up for it. The jelly fish had the crunchy, fresh mouth feel to it, which is always promising.

As per the suggestion of Mom’s friend, we had ordered these turnip cakes. These are little balls of flaky pastry that are filled with well-shred turnip and carrots. The bottom is covered completely in sesame seeds for an unforgettable ambush of sesame flavor on your tongue.

The pastry itself reminded me of a good tart, but made into a spherical form instead of a disc of some sort. There could have been more flavor to it though it’s fine the way it is, I think.

Lastly, we had Shanghai noodles, or maybe they were udon. Nothing particularly special about them except, again, not a lot of grease (surprise, surprise) which is always appreciated.

Shanghai Café is located at 100 Mott Street.