Omnivore’s Holiday (4) Shanghainess Dim-sum

 

Clock-wise: Drunken Chicken, Shanghainess-style Wonton soup, Pork ribs with rice cake and Xie-Ke-Huang, a sweet stuffed dessert.

 

    Last Saturday was one of the religious holiday for the many Buddhists, to celebrate the birth of the funder of the Buddhism. My family paid a visit to the Linyan Temple at Richmond for this festival. After the ceremony we were supposed to eat a Buddha feast featuring all vegetarian dishes, but the queue was so long that we decided our stomachs couldn’t wait any longer. So we went out to find our own feast for the day. The result being we were more happy to be meat-eating omnivores than vege chewing Buddhist monks.

    Richmond is the place when it comes to find the finest Chinese cooking, in Vancouver, or even in North America. I’ve been told many times that Richmond’s Chinese restaurants are at an much higher level compared to the their brothers from rest of the continents. My family is from Shanghai city where its own style of cuisine is famous for its dark color from soy source and the grease of oil. As Shanghai city is located in the joint between the northern and southern China, so does it’s cuisine combined the characters of north and south.

    We found this packed Shanghainess restaurant near Richmond Center. It was not the one we planned to go initially, but we were attracted by its crowdiness. According to my mom, one should never go visit a restaurant with lots of empty table in the lunch time. And she is absolutely correct with this one.(maybe not others, wink!) Bai Yu Lan is the name of the restaurant. we waited for half an hour to get a table for 4. We studied the menu carefully while waiting. The food came out fast. We ordered some of the signature dishes of Shanghai style cooking. The drunken chicken is very tender with meat socked up all the flavor of rice-wine, yet the wine taste did not overpower the nature flavor of chicken. The wonton soup has a light pork bone soup base with lots of seaweed and 10 small piece of wontons. The pork ribs with rice cakes is my favorite, slightly sweet sauce with tender pork and chewy-but-not-sticky rice cake, yum! The desserts were alright but not my favorite.

 

T

he juicy little steam pork bums are the best of all, love it love it love it!

The total came to be $42 dollars for 4 of us, which is quite good consider the quality of food. This restaurant is one of the best Chinese I’ve ever had in Vancouver, highly recommend to anyone who want to try something different than sweet-sour pork and sesame chicken.

Restaurant: Chen’s Shanghai Restaurant, they close on Wednesday.

Location: 8095 Park Road, Richmond, BC, V6Y 1S8  Phone:604-304-8288