By Dennis Chu on June 4, 2011 • ( 1 Comment )

SHANGHAI GOURMET

Address: 23 Pell Street, New York, NY 10013

Today, we took a trip out to New York City to visit my grandparents and we stopped out for lunch at Shanghai Gourmet. In past times out to the city, if we wanted to eat Shanghainese food, we would always stop at another place down the street called Joe’s Shanghai, which is always really crowded and usually has a long wait out the door, even before it opens! But after eating at Shanghai Gourmet, I think that the food might be better than at Joe’s Shanghai (an added bonus is that this place is usually not crowded at all).

We ordered a bunch of traditional Shanghai dishes today, such as xiao long bao, which is a small steamed bun that is filled with pork and a little bit of soup, sheng jian bao, which is a thicker steamed bun that is pan-fried on the bottom to crisp it up a bit, scallion pancakes, a fish soup with some cilantro in it, and then a fish dish that was fried with some seaweed-infused batter. Everything came out really fantastic and I was especially impressed with how tasty everything came out. The restaurant looked like most other places in Chinatown, where it’s just a modest storefront with some tables inside. All in all, it was a great meal where I left pretty stuffed, and I will be certainly back to eat here again in the future.

Here are my rankings for Shanghai Gourmet:

Food: 5 / 5
Shanghai Gourmet serves a lot of authentic Shanghainese dishes, and they do them really well.

Atmosphere: 4 / 5
The dining room is nothing really special, just an assortment of tables and decorations on the wall. Pretty average for a Chinatown restaurant.

Service: 4.5 / 5
The wait staff was very good about coming back and refilling our water / tea and clearing empty plates from our table.

Price: 4.5 / 5
The price of the food is pretty comparable to other Chinatown restaurants, and we got a ton of food for what we paid today.

Overall: 18 / 20 (90%)