Not Lynn's Shanghai Cusine, just Lynn Shanghai Cuisine. . . Wonder what Lynn is? Anyway this is a kind of newish dumpling place in town, so I thought I'd check it out with my girlfriend this week. It has received good reviews, it's reasonably priced for Asian food and I hadn't had dumplings for a while. It's in The Castlereagh Club but you don't have to sign in, just walk on through. I never knew this club exisited, the decor is quite sparse and minimal, colour of choice, red of course with a glass enclosed kitchen where you can see the chefs make the dumplings. Although the bench comes up over where their hands are so you just see the top half of them. . . so you can't really see the dumpling being made. . . . . .
Ordering is done by ticking the dish you want on a piece of paper. To start off with we ordered the "Famous Shanghai steamed pork dumplings" - 7.5/10. Pretty good with a bit of broth inside, the texture of the outside was perfect, not too thin and not too thick and floury. Thought I'd start rating the dishes I eat too. I started it in my last Thai post but kind of forgot to rate the rest of the meal as I was too excited about writing my first food post lol!
"Pork and shrimp wontons tossed in a spicy sauce" - 8/10. These were great, a bit slippery but the filling was very tasty, right balance of meaty and shrimpy, and the sauce was mildly chilli. I added some of the chilli sauce to it which had white sesame seeds all the way through it in a thick red oily concoction. I hadn't seen or tasted that before, I should've taken a pic of it, it was very hot! I apologise for the bad pics. If I am serious about this blogging thing I will think about carrying my camera with me everywhere I go but then again am I going to be brave enough to whip it out in front of everyone when dining out??? I suppose I am Asian, so it's kind of expected.
I felt like the hot and sour soup so I ordered it but I was very disappointed!! 2/10. It looked good with shredded meat and bamboo shoot but the taste was not right at all. I should've known by the colour of it, they should of had a picture of it on the menu. Too watery and totally not enough of the hot or sour flavours! They really need to fix this as a good hot and sour soup really builds up the apetite and then people would order more food!
We also got the "Sauteed eggplant with minced pork in chilli garlic sauce" - 7/10 a popluar Chinese dish, it was quite tasty, eggplant was nice and soft but the flavour was not as strong as I had hoped. My mum makes a good version of this with more tomato and a thicker gravy sauce thing, cooked in a hot pot.
Then we had the "Sauteed string beans with bambooo shoots" - 7/10, nice simple vege dish. We didn't finish these last 2 dishes as we ate our meal with a bottle of white and by the end of it we were struggling big time.
The front of house was Chinese of course but had a thick Aussie accent that was so prominent my friend and I had a chuckle about it as it was more Aussie than an Aussie found in the Woolies carpark of say, Minto. All waiters had great English despite the accent! The service was great although we did feel rushed at the end despite it only being just past 10pm! Actually just looked at the website it says they cloe at 9:30pm! Now that's a problem. . .
Besides that I would recommend this place, especially for someones birthday as there were 4 rounds of Happy Birthday being sung, including the staff, my friend and I felt a bit left out! Hahaha!
