Shanghai Bund - Big dissappointment one week after!!
Well Fellow Chowhound! One week after experiencing one of the best Shanghainese meal in North America at Shamghai Bund, I'm sad to report that the return dinner I had tonight was a real dissappointment. Caneast and I, together with 11 family members went and ordered the following:
- Deluxe cold cut/antipasti platter
- Fried whole yellow fish in a sweet piquante sauce
- Stir fried yellowing chives with shredded eel
- Oil poached river prawns
- Shanghainese pot-au-feu with chinese ham, bamboo shoot and bean curd ravioli
- Stirred fry dungeness crab and fava beans with Chinese miso paste
- Deep fried french beans with spicy diced pork
- Sugar/vinegar spare ribs
- Napa cabbage in a cream sauce with diced Chinese ham
- Don Bo Pork- Pot stickers, Shanghainese fried noodles and DanDan Noodle
- Deep fried Chinese doughnuts with red bean paste and banana filling
To get a true picture of the kitchen's real calibre and pedigree, Caneast and I deliberately decided NOT to ask the owner Victor for special treatment - A big mistake?!!!
For $300, the dinner overall was bordereline disaster. In general, the degree of saltiness of the various dishes was very inconsistent. This is most bothersome. Components that made up the cold cut platter were fine examples. Casing point, the drunken chicken was bland and tasteless whilst the gelatinous Chinese ham loaf was way too salty. All dishes that involved a sweet or sweet & sour base were way too sweet. All gravies used to finish off dishes were way too starchy and excessive. No single one dish stood out positively except may be the dessert, which was not too sweet thus allowing one to taste the fresh ingredients of home made red bean and seasame paste. Lastly, from the three glasses of water that I drank after the meal, I can also deduce that the kitchen either uses an excessive amount of MSG or the dishes were indeed too salty
I sure hope this is a one time thing. But!!! How could one tell unless one give it a second try? But after tonight's fiasco - decisions and uncertainties?!!!!!
May be to play safe, I'll just wait for my next trip to the Far East for good reliable Shanghainese food!!!
Charles Yu
Jul 29, 2007 07:46PM
That's a big order, for discerning patrons. Maybe 6 orders, for 6 people, would be a fair test.
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Well not neceesarily so! A top notched and well run kitchen like O'Mei on Hwy7 have no problem handling mega size order for 11-13 persons round tables. The food were consistently great even on busy weekends!
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A order of Charles 's size is nothing .... I think maybe it is still relatively new, that may be their excuse.
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Chinese restaurants are often packed with tables of 10-12 people. It's expected that they can serve them and unlike "western" restaurants they're usually not serving 10 plated dishes per course.
However, that's dismaying since I was planning to take my parents there and woe to me if I disappoint them ;).
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I went there for lunch today. Didn't order anything too special and was dissappointed by the service, and the food was ok but it can easily be better.
When we first arrived, the hostess seemed more interested in chatting with her friends than taking care of customers. This is in the middle of lunch service with 3 or 4 tables waiting!! It took us 5 minutes to get her attention to give us a number for the table.
As for the meal, we didn't order anything special, just Jelly fish, saliva chicken, braised beef noodles soup, and Xiao Lun Bao.
First came the Jelly fish. It was a bit bland, and a bit ont he chewy side, but it is still better than the jelly fish that's served in many places in Toronto.
Then came the braised beef noodles. The broth was great, and the braised beef was pretty good. However, noodles were a bit under cooked, and probably sat for a while before they put the broth in, so the noodles were only luke warm...
The saliva chicken was again better than many I've tasted recently, but the dark meat was too chewy and the white meat was too dryed. The sauce was good though, but not as good as Spicy Mama's(I miss that place so much) used to be. (To be fair, this is more a Szechuen dish, but if they can't make it well, they should put it on their menu. :p)
As for their Xiao Lun Bao, I have no idea how good or bad it is... It never showed up. We asked one waitress to check it, she came back after about 10 minutes asking us if we were waiting for spring rolls.... While we were waiting for her, we asking another lady to check the order, she came back and told us they missed the order so we cancelled it and left.
Overall, the food was above average, and the short coming can be improved easily. Hopefully, they can work out the kinks in their kitchen and eventually fix these things. However, the service was just horrible, and that's much harder to fix.
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Might it be possible that the "head chef" was not there that night, and instead their second in line was doing most of the cooking? Sometimes I find that I notice a difference in cooking quality in some restaurants depending on which night you go.
On the other hand, if you went on a busy weekend night (fri/sat), then most likely the head chef "should" be there since it's the busiest time.
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WCIU: hey I miss Spicy Mama too! but I found the quality and standard of food spotty after the Mama left and only her niece was running it, this must have been 2 years ago, then they died a slow death I believe. Really missed their cold noodles and all those cold beef and chicken dishes, unlike a lot of the Szechuan restaurants now the spices were subtle and complex and still strong. Nowadays they just pour pepper oil and garlic on top of everything and you can never get over the initial shock to taste anything else! So have you found any good substitute for Szechuan food yet?
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Haven't really been able to find any place for the dishes that I really enjoyed at Mama's. I miss a lot of their cold dishes too, like "Saliva" Chicken, pig ears, and their "over the bridge" noodles and Yunnan noodles were pretty good too. I just miss the "Saliva" chicken the most though, I think the sauce they have is complex and perfectly balanced. I've tried many times to do that at home but never got anywhere close.... but then I'm not really that good a cook. :)
The sauce at Shanghai bund was actually pretty good as I mentioned, it was a bit too sweet for my taste, and felt like it's just not quite there....
Nowadays, I go to Old house and Backyard garden for Szechuen mostly, but I don't visit them as often as I used to with Mama's and they are both much closer to where I live than Mama's was....
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Some interesting discussion on just what Saliva Chicken is has been moved over to our General Topics board at: http://www.chowhound.com/topics/426915 so more hounds can participate.
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I went there for lunch. The service was ok. No complaint. Here are the dishes we ordered:
- chicken w/ shanghai wine - bland & lack of wine favour. However, I like they made it with whole chicken, not debone drumstick.
- smoked fish - delicious, excellent. It's whole pc of black cod. Probably the best smoked fish in Toronto.
- marinated pork jelly - good & favourfull. Could be better if more tender.
- shredded chicken w/ rice jelly in peanut sauce - ok, not outstanding, the peanut sauce is quite nice.
- braised fish fillet w/ wine - good, just the right amount of wine.
- stuffed duck w/ glutinous rice - good, skin is a little bit crispy, the filling not mushy.
- cream sauce cabbage w/ Shanghai ham - bad, cream sauce is yucky.
- braised noodle w/ veg - good, very neat.
- fried rice cake w/ pork & cabbage - good, not too oily, rice cake w/ the right texture, chewy.
- chop soy rice crispy w/ soup - not so good, the soup is bland.
- soup filled steam dumplings - good, not outstanding.
- steamed pork & veg bun - so so.
- deep fried egg white ball w/ sesame - good, not too sweet.
Most dishes come out hot which is very good.
Although not all dishes are outstanding, most of them are above average. I'll go there again & try other dishes.
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I wasn't sure whether to post my follow-up review meal of this restaurant under Charles' "fantastic find" post, or "big dissapointment" post, but in the end I went with the latter for a few reasons.
We had a table of 5 adults and 2 small kids today for lunch @ 1:30. We wanted to try their special advance order only-dishes, which they refused to do since it was "too early in the day" and would only do for dinner service. I brought along 2 friends, one of whom is originally from Shanghai and another from Sichuan province.
We had the following:
Free appetizer - owner Victor brought out a dish of cooked eggplant with brown garlic sauce. Probably the best dish of the day, cooked perfectly and just enough sauce.
Cold Jelly fish appetizer - standard, nothing fancy.
Cold tofu cubes and malan veggie in cabbage leaf - very oily, veggie kind of bland
Stir fried eel w/ yellow chives - eel was from China, which made us worried about how much heavy metal and other contaminants could be in there. Drowned in thick goopy brown sauce, almost couldn't taste the eel (unlike the eel that I had at the Japanese restaurant Cafe Michi which was really fresh).
Braised fish fillet in wine sauce - the wine was so strong that we all noted it to be quite bitter. At the end of the meal, there were quite a few left over pieces of fish on the plate.
Bamboo shoots - about the same as the first time I had it, decent
Pan fried buns w/ meat - not crunchy enough on the bottom. My first bite was all bun and no meat, plus filling was bland. At least my kid gobbled it all up. Haven't found any one in TO that does half a decent job as the ones sold for a quarter on the streets of Shanghai
Pickled green veggie meat noodle soup - for a HK style Shanghai restaurant as the owner boasted, really disappointing noodles: bland soup, noodle w/ too much soda flavor, almost all the other shanghai restaraunts do a a better job.
Service was good, although it was not during a busy time of day for them. Compared to a few weeks ago when they first opened and we went around 2pm and they were almost completely packed w/ customers, I think the novelty of the place is wearing off.
It might be repetitive for the group to read all the above, but I feel this place comes up short yet again. I'll stick with Hi Shanghai on Steeles for now as my go-to Shanghainese restaurant - more selection, better decor, better food if you order wisely.
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I think Hi Shanghai is really bad. The wonton chicken soup I had in there is served half warm ! I don't think I will ever return to it. None of the dishes I had is good there.
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I find the food at Hi Shanghai really bad too. I went there in March & ordered 3 dishes & all were terrible. I was hoping the food would be good as I like the decor.
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Hi Skyline, sorry you didn't like Hi Shanghai at all. I've been there 3 times (2 of which were dinner meals) thus far. Although their stuff is still not "perfect" Shanghainese, none of their dishes was really that terrible (at least not the stuff I ordered). I think I posted a review of some of their stuff on another thread. I overheard from another customer that they used to have a smaller location on a small strip mall just next to the large No Frills on Silver star blvd (just south of Steeles). I believe Charles Yu had mentioned that place used to be his favorite shanghainese (correct me if I'm wrong Charles, I don't want to be putting words into your mouth). :)
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Hi Royaljelly, maybe they have improved since then. I was there like 3 months ago. Decor is very nice except one of the sink in the washroom is not working and the menu is very good looking with many pictures. So I really also hope the food is good there too.
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After hearing about the hype i decided to venture out to Shanghai Bund on my recent trip to Toronto from Virginia and I must say I was quite disappointed. I called a day in advance to order the beggar's chicken and when i got there they told me they ran out!!! i was really disappointed since i wanted to enjoy a nice birthday meal. The service was also rather bad. We ordered the beef with green onions, soup dumpling, spicy crabs (this was pretty good), and peking duck. Our food came out and it took them a good 5-7 minutes to bring us some white rice. To top it off, as we paid our bill and were getting ready to leave the restaurant, they brought out beggar's chicken for another table!!! I'm not sure what the deal was, is it because I didn't speak chinese??
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