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2010-08-06
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What draws your attention when you choose a restaurant? When you have no guidebooks, or no Internet access on your phone, or anything that tells you what to eat and where, no menu outside to show you, and no media coverage either? There is a certain instinct, I must say, that one often judge the restaurant by its cover. The idea of a place that looks the part it's meant to be -- a rundown establishment can still serve good food, and often times nice decor can make up for crappy food. But for som
This day I was driven by more than the idea of soup-filled dumpings. It was a brand new place, with celebratory flower bouquets lining up along the streets. The colourful array of flowers caught my eye, and the sight of the words 小籠包 got my attention, and the next thing I found myself drawn towards the new shop. The restaurant is composed of small booths of four, seating about 100 at a time. The attention grabbing detail didn't lie in the menu though, it's the air-conditioning. It's freezing cold in the shop even when you're served with hot tea that steams.
The menu has more than enough Shanghainese dishes that one can often find in cookbooks, but doesn't matter for anyone who has little knowledge about it, because the staff can take care of that for you. They can be quite knowledgable, and if you can't, you can check to see if there are pictures in the main menu, if it's the snack/ appetizers that you have trouble with, you can check the smaller menu, they have a tiny picture of each dish featured. The afternoon tea menu looks tempting enough -- an order of noodle soup plus a beverage of choice for $30 (plus 10% gratuity), and then there are time-of-day promotions as well. At the time of visit, it's a $10 an order of soup-filled buns. So we placed an order -- Hot and Sour Soup noodles ($30) and one order of soup-filled buns.($10) For beverage we had one iced soy milk, said to be house-made.
The hot and sour soup noodles arrived shortly, stunning us into silence. One would only guess an afternoon tea portion to be cut-down. Not a chance, in fact it was larger than ordinary serving. The appearance was textbook perfect-- evenly cut shreds of mushrooms, woodear mushrooms, dried tofu, and bamboo shoots (and ginger too) filled the thickened brown broth, revealing a glimpse of the beige noodles underneath. You could be bathed with a whiff of steam and greeted with the aroma of freshness when you pick up the bunch of noodles from its broth. The broth itself tasted fine, but there is a catch -- maybe because of the moisture-bearing noodles freshly transferred from the cooking liquid into the bowl, still very wet, the hot and sour soup turned quickly from thick to quite thin after one loosens the noodles in the bowl. The soup has minimal heat but the black vinegar has done its job contributing the sour part. The noodles were creamy and soft, but not at a point of mushiness. It makes a rich and filling treat, as the serving can be quite large.
The Soup-filled dumplings arrived nice and plump. A thin round of dough, filled quickly with jellie stock and pork mixture and pleated at the top, forming somewhat of a crown at the tip and steamed inside bamboo baskets in a group of four at a time. The filled dumplings, steamy hot when served, slumped slightly as you pick them up with chopsticks. Taking a bite unveils the pale pork filling and its flavorful juices. It needed no dipping into the vinegar, but I strongly recommended a silver of ginger though, adding the lightest of stimulation to the otherwise rich dumpling. One particular flaw of the dumpling though, lies at the pleated top. (only two dumplings' tops weren't cooked through, the other two were fine) As the picture here indicates, the dough could either be pinched hard enough to form that firm round of dough at the top, or it could be too thick to begin with. The white rings indicates that the dough has not be thoroughly cooked though, hence creating a starchy texture, but the dumpling itself is quite nice as a whole. The soy milk has a slightly thicker consistency and it's mildly sweet, although it leaves a slightly "starchy" texture to it, affecting its smoothness for the entire beverage, although the flavour itself is dense.
For a new lunch spot, this Shanghainese shop certainly offers more than noodles, and plenty of promotions intending to attract more diners at its opening. The promotions can be rather confusing to understand, but the staff are more than happy to explain them to you.
張貼
