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Our new shop Shanghai Cuisine 33  has been launched on 23 Sep 2012 !

57-33 Main Street, Flushing, New York, NY, United States

What a strange menu Shanghai Asian Cuisine has! The lower end, price-wise, is noodles, soups, dumplings, and the little appetizing dishes that form the heart of Shanghai cuisine. The more expensive end is basically Chinese-American carryout—though, in a thoroughly modern way, the bill of fare favors a bland version of Sichuan over Cantonese. It offers virtually no Shanghai entrées, like braised pork shoulder and lion-head meatballs. Just who is the menu aimed at?

Shanghai Asian Cuisine (SAC) is a gleaming new café located adjacent to the so-called Chinatown Mall—a narrow passageway lined with small businesses running between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery. The alley recalls the Chinatown of a century ago, when tong members armed with hatchets murdered their rivals with a quick chop to the head then escaped via such routes. Believe me, you’re in no danger of head cleavage now as you ease into SAC to discover two comfortable lines of tables occupied by an interesting mix of patrons, from Chinese students bearing laptops, to suburban couples in the city for an afternoon of shopping, to cops from the precinct house across the street.

The don’t-miss dish to be seen on every table is the celebrated Shanghai soup dumplings. These quavering, liquid-containing pouches—shaped like a round leather coin purse with a pucker on top—took the city by storm a decade ago, resulting in nearly a dozen places slinging the cuisine in Manhattan alone. At SAC, the eight dumplings (“steamed tiny buns with crab meat and pork,” $7.45) boast a yellowish wad of crab sticking out the top, like chin whiskers on an octogenarian. With no stinting on cost or flavor, the pork filling is also miraculously high in crab content.

Several friends agreed one evening that these soup dumplings are the city’s best; with a skin so thin, it’s a challenge getting them from steamer to mouth intact. The accompanying tongs (utensils, not gang members) are useless, because they tear the supremely thin membrane. Your only choice is to grab the purse by the pucker with your fingers and carefully boost it onto the spoon. And thus to your mouth: Nip off the top and suck out the hot juices before eating the rest of the dumpling, dipped in black vinegar. How are these amazing pouches engineered? The soup is incorporated into the filling in gelatin form, which turns to liquid once the dumplings are steamed.

Other dumplings on the menu are damn fine, too, making SAC one of the few places in Chinatown you can enjoy all-day dim sum. Shaped something like a conch shell, the watercress-and-shrimp models ($5.45 for six) display a pale-green tint. The pea-shoot ones are also worth scarfing; in fact, they’re a real delight on a menu with few vegetarian offerings. Skip the “Szechuan” wontons, which substitute a sweet soy sauce for the usual hot chili oil. Go instead to Cold Dishes, a menu section that represents a particular Shanghai passion.

These selections are said to represent a style of eating brought to the Chinese metropolis by the Russians a century ago, in which a series of room-temp selections are served buffet-style as prelude to a banquet. The most famous is mock duck ($6), slices of non-meat made with tofu skin and mushrooms, reputedly invented by Buddhist monks. Some places, it really looks like duck. Not here. At three choices for $16, you can assemble your own mini-buffet of small dishes. You might pick smoked fish (gnarly and chewy), jellyfish (shredded and sustainable), and wine chicken (tangy, pale, and poached). For the most adventuresome eaters, the feet of the wine chicken can also be yours.

Featuring thick noodles in dark soy sauce, the section Shanghai Style Lo Mein offers several topping combinations, of which “mixed meat and seafood” is the most desirable. The best pasta of all is illogically located among one of the soup sections: Noodles with meat sauce ($5.75) is an excellent take on a northern Chinese specialty called zha jiang mian—also available in Korean restaurants—that features cucumber-garnished wheat noodles with a thick gravy of ground meat and preserved black beans. You should avoid the most expensive section of the menu, Shanghai Asian Cuisine Specialties ($9.75 to $15.95)—a bunch of sticky-sweet remakes of dishes you’ve had better versions of elsewhere.

Oozing an agreeable leguminous paste, the flaky pastry of red bean pancakes ($4.50) suggests a Malaysian or Indian origin. And just because there’s no such thing as dessert in a Chinese restaurant, that shouldn’t stop you from ordering a batch at the end of your meal and treating them that way.

Reference:
By Robert Sietsema , Village Voice, 2011

http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-12-07/restaurants/shanghai-asian-cuisine-nip-and-suck/

Shanghai Asian Cuisine offers a cozy dining space to sample some Shanghainese favorites in the heart of Chinatown. Locals and visitors enjoy the complimentary hot tea, the friendly service and authentic dishes,like the Xiao Long Bao, a juicy dumpling filled with steamed pork and a tasty soup broth. The picture-filled menu proves reader-friendly,while prices remain budget-friendly. Other restaurant favorites include the cold wine chicken and Shanghai-style Lo Mein.(nycgo.com)

Reading the signs and menus scattered around Chinatown is often an exercise in what can be described as Lost in Translation. At Shanghai Asian Cuisine, the whole experience seems to fit this theme. For one, there’s not much in terms of Shanghainese food at this restaurant.

If you want to judge a Shanghainese kitchen for authenticity, a soup dumpling seems to be a good way to go. Luckily, this dish is done very well here. The classic crab and pork filled one are generously filled with crab inside the liquid-filled pouches. The wrapper is thin, which makes it tricky to eat, but it allows you to savor all the juices and is filling without getting you full on the gluten.

Although it’s a small space, you might enjoy this place more like a dim sum spot. Once you move on from the soup dumplings and other solid dumpling choices, the Shanghai-style lo mein laced with dark soy sauce and medley of mixed meats and seafood is worth ordering. A mysterious noodle with meat sauce is a good spin on the class zha jiang mian that’s topped with fresh cucumbers. Once you veer from the native dishes, though, the menu gets more expensive for food that’s basically Chinese-American fare. Skip that and stick to the Shanghai classics.

Address: 14A Elizabeth Street, Telephone: 212-964-5640

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Reference:
By Bao Ong (contributing food writer), Our Chinatown, 2011

http://www.ourchinatown.org/2011/12/30/good-eats-shanghai-asian-cuisine/

I went to Shanghai Asian Cuisine with a large group in search of xiao long bao (soup dumplings), but ended up finding two completely different dishes that I liked as much. Not to say that I don’t like xiao long bao—that’d be silly—I’m just no connoisseur of these pork and soup-filled dumplings. Their version satisfied me: the skins were perilously thin (a few dumplings broke in the tonging process) and the innards were full of burning hot soup and a pork ball.

But I especially liked the kau fu, a cold dish of squidgey wheat gluten chunks mixed with wood ear mushrooms in a slightly sweet soy sauce-based sauce. The wheat gluten chunks have an appealing spongy, chewy texture.

I love fried calamari of all kinds, so it’s no surprise that I also loved the squid with salt and pepper. It wasn’t like the rings of fried calamari I’m used to eating at Italian restaurants; these were fat squid chunks (no rings) completely encased in a light, crispy coating, and liberally salted, with a bit of pepper. Soft, but not rubbery, some pieces tasted a little too salt-heavy, but I think that excess hit of sodium just added to their addictiveness.

Shanghai Asian Cuisine

14 Elizabeth Street, New York NY 10013 (b/n Bayard and Canal; map)

212-964-5640

Reference
by Robyn Lee, New York Serious Seats, 2009

http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2009/09/soup-dumplings-and-more-shanghai-asian-cuisine-chinatown-nyc.html

Here they are — in the crab and pork permutation.
Fifteen years ago when Shanghai soup dumplings first hit town, they caused a sensation, and foodies were lining up at the 7 train to sojourn to Flushing to get them at the original Joe’s Shanghai. Soon thereafter, the dumplings — bulging with dangerously hot soup, more grease than soup — became commonplace on the menus, not only of all the Shanghai places that opened up in Manhattan’s Chinatown (I counted six at one point), but also on the menus of Chinese restaurants representing other regions, or sometimes no particular region at all.

The dining room of Shanghai Asian Cuisine
Eventually, Joe cloned himself, and there were two Joe’s in Manhattan. The problem was, the dumplings at all these places started sliding downward. First, many of them were deprived of their negligible crab component, which in the best examples send the filling in an oceanic direction (pig of the sea?). Second, the skins on the dumpling kept getting thicker and thicker, as dumpling makers unsure of their dumpling-making chops indemnified themselves against the charge of broken dumplings by making sure the dumplings never broke.

Well, a friend clued me to the dumplings at Shanghai Asian Cuisine, a newcomer to Elizabeth Street in the block south of Canal, lying at the mouth of the arcade that connects Elizabeth and Bowery.

The dumplings are superb: thin-skinned, extravagantly stuffed with plenty of pork and crab, with a little tuft of yellow crab protruding from the pucker like chin whiskers on a hillbilly codger. OK, the crab is probably the frozen product, but the enhanced crabby edge enlivens the ground meat. And, as in the original soup dumplings we enjoyed in Flushing long ago, these are so delicate that the slightest false move ruptures the skin and out gushes the fillling. Defeat!

So what about the restaurant’s name? Well, the Shanghai stuff is mainly the lower end of the menu (meat balls, mock duck of mushrooms and bean-curd skin, chicken in wine vinegar, braised noodles, etc.), and the “Asian” stuff at the high end mainly Cantonese, Sichuan, and other regional Chinese. Stick with the Shanghai food.

The exterior of Shanghai Asian Cuisine

Shanghai Asian Cuisine
14 Elizabeth Street
212-964-5640

Reference:
By Robert Sietsema , Village Voice Blog, 2011

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2011/11/soup_dumplings.php

Shanghai Asian Manor offers a cozy dining space to sample some Shanghainese favorites in the heart of Chinatown. Locals and visitors enjoy the complimentary hot tea, the friendly service and authentic dishes,like the Xiao Long Bao, a juicy dumpling filled with steamed pork and a tasty soup broth. The picture-filled menu proves reader-friendly,while prices remain budget-friendly. Other restaurant favorites include the cold wine chicken and Shanghai-style Lo Mein.(nycgo.com)