New Shanghai Chinese Restaurant, Ashfield

Some of you may recall that I visited Chinese Fast Food and Shanghai Night to sample their xiao long baos. You may even remember that I wanted to complete the trifecta by tasting the wares at New Shanghai Chinese Restaurant which is located next to Shanghai Night, and a few doors down from Chinese Fast Food.

Well my dreams came true! I feel like this is a big accomplishment as I can now pick and choose which one I think is the best.

Entry

It is Sunday lunchtime and this place is buzzing. As soon as one table leaves, another set of diners come to take their place.

Unfortunately the hectic pace of the restuarant means that the tables are not very clean, nor is the floor. The waitress frantically scrubbed at our table as the previous patrons left but one seat at our table had large fish bones and bits of noodles under the chair! Ew.

Sample menu page

We ordered three dishes to start off with and sat around waiting for it to come out. It took about ten to fifteen minutes before the xiao long baos came out.

These were very good. Very good indeed. Each little parcel of dumpling was tight, with no leaks and a large amount of oily soup inside.

Next up were the pan fried pork buns. These were my next favourite after the xiao long baos.

In terms of presentation, I would give them a 1/10. Can you still get one mark if there is no effort put into presentation at all? I guess the one mark is for not having any bugs or random articles on the plate.

The buns had been tossed haphazardly on the plate and there was huge pools of oil.

Of course, oil wasn’t going to stop me from devouring the buns.

The buns were quite good. Although they are smaller than at other Shanghai restaurants, I found that the proportion of bun to meat was better.

There was a decent amount of soup inside the bun and I preferred to eat these over the fried dumplings.

Once again, presentation was lacking. Sure, you could say that you don’t come here for presentation but even the other Ashfield Shanghainese restaurants arranged the fried dumplings in two neat rows.

The dumplings had been left on for just a bit too long, which toughened the dumpling skin.

After we finished these three dishes, I still had some room in my stomach so we ordered one more round of xiao long baos 🙂

These came out within five minutes so I presumed we managed to squeeze in our order while a fresh batch had already been started.

So I am a bit torn. I do like the xiao long baos here, very much so – but the uncleanliness of the floors was a bit off putting. I was going to take a photo for this blog but decided it was a bit gross (not to mention disinclination to incite the wrath of an angry proprietor). Perhaps I should visit at a time that is not so busy? But by all accounts, this place is very popular so when would a less-busy time be?