New Shanghai | Excuse Me Waiter

A colleague of mine is relatively new to the North/Western suburbs of Sydney and wanted to know some good restaurants to go to. I suggested Shanghainese cuisine, to which she responded that she had a very unpleasant time eating that cuisine in the past. She wasn’t sure what to order and didn’t order any dumplings! So I convinced her to give Shanghainese cuisine another go and to let us introduce some delicious dishes for her to try.

Tonight we are dining at New Shanghai restaurant; there’s five of them in NSW of which two are in Chatswood. We’ve chosen the original Chatswood one located in Lemon Grove (a short walk from the train station) because it’s slightly more convenient by public transport and also cheaper. After a quick glance at the menu, I notice that it differs from the Chatswood Chase branch; the design and style is different along with some of the menu items. Some of my much loved dishes aren’t on this menu unfortunately (Prawns fried in egg yolk, Rainbow Beef), but there are still some great dishes on offer.

Steamed Mini Pork Bun (Xiao Long Bao), 8pcs – $7.20

First up is the traditional Shanghainese Pork Dumpling or “Xiao Long Bao”. We’ve reviewed this several times before at LYNN Shanghai Cuisine and at Shanghai Stories 1938 so we knew what to expect. Freshly steamed pork dumplings with hot soup inside; the skin is soft and it goes well with vinegar. It needs to be eaten quite soon or else when it cools, the dumpling skin hardens and it is more likely to break. 90% of ours didn’t break which is a pretty good effort.

Drunken Chicken – $9.20

A typical entrée dish of drunken chicken came next. This consists of boneless pieces of cold chicken soaked in Chinese wine, herbs and spices. It has a lovely wine flavour, very succulent and tasty.

Pan Fried Pork Dumpling (8 pcs) – $9.20

Following this was our Pan Fried Pork Dumplings which came extremely quickly, no more than 5 minutes after we placed our order. The skin is crispy and contains inside a small lump of meat and some soup. I found that the meat inside was a bit small so it felt that I was eating a lot more skin, however the skin was very delicious.

Shallot Pancake (2pcs) – $5.20

Next was the shallot pancake. I’m not too sure why the menu says 2 pieces when it is cut into 6 (I think maybe it’s 2 thin pancakes pushed together to make 1?). This pancake is flat, crispy and contains shallots enveloped within it. I found that there wasn’t that many shallots there, however as a fried dish you can’t go wrong with the flavour.

Deep Fried Chicken with Special Garlic and Chilli Sauce – $14.50

One of my friends said that they had tried this chicken dish before so we thought we’d give it a go. The chicken presented to us was tender with crispy skin, however was completely flavourless. There was no garlic or chilli apparent and I was quite disappointed. Apparently they forgot to give us the sauce which we then asked for. The waitress gave us a sweet garlic soy sauce which thankfully made the chicken taste a lot better! I’m so happy we asked for the sauce or otherwise this chicken would have been a disastrous dish.

Stir Fried Noodle with Shredded Pork and Vegetable – $9.20

Our final dish was a classic Shanghai stir fried noodle. We requested to change the pork to chicken as my friend couldn’t eat chicken. Unfortunately this request was not possible. So we tried to have the pork separated onto a separate dish. Once again they couldn’t facilitate this. I didn’t think that these requests were unreasonable and was a bit annoyed that they couldn’t make these requests work. In the end we had a vegetarian and tofu noodle. The sauce was a bit sweet and didn’t seem like the correct sauce for this type of dish.

Overall, I am happy with New Shanghai’s quality of food as it is both tasty and cheap. Unfortunately our experience was only average as they forgot one of our sauces and couldn’t facilitate a vegetarian request, but nevertheless it is still a good restaurant that I will be returning to in the future.