Shanghai Chef Kitchen - Parramatta

Today, I went to a restaurant nearby for dinner. Ambience, very casual, nothing special to see here but an obvious local favourite as this place is packed for lunch with daily lunch specials from $7.80.

Most Shanghai restaurants provide the 'Shanghai style' meals and at the same time also have the casual 'Canton style' dining (so the mongolian lamb, sweet n sour pork etc.)

At Shanghai Chef Kitchen, this does not differ and so on my visit I went for a 'Shanghai style' dinner. It was pretty quiet today, and so we quickly made our orders.

This was the first dish to arrive on our table, Hot n Sour soup. For $4.80, this is probably one of the best Hot n Sour soups you will get. There is a larger size for $8.80 but we settled at the small size.

Quickly after, came the 'Shanghai Fried Noodles'. As I said, it was a pretty quiet night for them so all the food practically came in 15 minutes, most the 15 minutes probably the time needed to steam the buns.

The noodles were great. Elasticity of the noodles was very good yet easy to bite through, little bit of pork meat with a relative amount of light and dark soy sauce gave it great taste and texture. The greens were a nice extra, one of my personal favourites.

This is the 'Seaweed Short Soup'. For those that know short soup, that normally uses a chicken broth, but this one has its own special soup base with Seaweed. Unlike the original short soups chicken-broth based soup, this ones lightly flavoured yet very diverse, one of the restaurants specialties.

Some Pork Ear... and many many dumplings!

The soup buns, 'xiao long bao' little dragon buns translated in english were very well made here. Good xiaolongbao's are defined by thin pastry, great tasting soup and pork mince. It is very easy to oversteam the buns, even one or two minutes extra can cause the pastry to pop or stick to the bottom, thus controlling the timing of steaming these buns is very important. The xiao long bao's here were perfectly steamed, and met all the requirements of good soup buns. I personally think they have some of the best xiao long bao's around Sydney.

Last was the pan-fried dumplings. These weren't bad, the meat inside was very nice and the soup squirted when I bit the pastry but I personally thought the pastry was too thick and the meat was too little.

All in all it was a pretty nice casual dinner and I would come back for some more.

My Rating: 7.5/10

-Samuel.