Shanghai Village

Shanghai Village @ 3250 Cambie St.

We'd spotted this place last week after driving away from 3G, which is just a block or two to the south on Cambie. We decided to give it a try yesterday.

How did we like it? The food was great. We were so impressed that we'd be willing to overlook the inattentive service to try out more of the dishes on their big and interesting menu.

The name in Chinese 憶江南 (Yi Jiang Nan) actually means 'Memories of the Southern Yangtze River' or something of that sort. The subtitle 新派上海菜 means Contemporary Shanghai Cuisine.

The food appears to be a combination of traditional Shanghainese dishes and some creative inventions of their own. As you enter, they proudly display the award they got for an innovative dish in this year's Chinese Restaurant Awards:

The name of the dish in question, if you can't find it, is "Stir-fried fish noodle with enoki mushroom". As soon as I saw this award, I decided to order this dish. It's nice to have a reference point like this that you know will be a good place to start with a restaurant.

From the outside it looks like a very small joint, but when you enter it's bigger than you expected, and fancier. They have big tables and very nice, big, comfortable red chairs at all the tables. Their dishware is even personalized with the Chinese reading of the restaurant's name.

They also have their own unique style of teapot at this place that looks very cool and pours nicely, without the messy dribbling of that squat oval teapot you find at many Chinese restaurants.

Their menu is also very fancy, in good condition, and has great presentation with lots of photos. They have two menus, the main menu seen below and a dim sum menu.

 

Dim sum is reasonably priced, but the dishes in the main menu are priced on the high end.

It's unfortunate that the service was sub-par. We were standing by the entrance for a good two minutes waiting for someone to acknowledge our presence. A server passed by twice without even looking at us. After being seated, we sat for ten minutes looking at the menu without anyone coming by to bring us tea or ask for our order. Nobody checked on us throughout the meal.

Luckily, the food came out pretty quick, and each dish was satisfying, so the quality of the food and the speed at which it came out fairly wiped away our dissatisfaction with the service.

Stir-fried fish noodle with enoki mushroom ($13.99)

This was the first dish to come out. It looked weird, but it smelled absolutely marvelous. It was very aromatic, with a sickly sweet, fermented, vinegary kind of odor we couldn't quite put our finger on. I don't know what the sauce is made of, but we guessed maybe it involved rice wine. It's a very light sauce, but with a great aroma. Not at all greasy.

The taste lived up to the smell. It was very light but extremely flavorful. The noodles have a very curious texture, unlike regular wheat or rice noodles. They're very light and airy, spongy. We're not sure how they were made, but obviously it must involve fish paste, either pure fish paste or some combination with flour or starch, I'm not good enough to be able to reverse-engineer it.

There are a lot of enoki mushrooms in there, and they go really well with the 'noodles', adding a sort of crunchy bite.

Really good dish, unlike anything I've had anywhere else. A successful experiment, I'd say.

Salted soy milk Shanghai style ($2.99) 

This was delightful. The soy milk contained Chinese donut, some kind of seaweed, maybe cilantro pieces, some kind of crushed nut, and some kind of oil floating on top. The whole really went well together. It was very different from the usual soy milk we're used to tasting, since it's salted. It was only lukewarm and would have been better nice and hot, but it was still just great, and a good price to boot. A great item to get to have a little sip between bites of the other dishes.

Chef's specialty spareribs ($3.29 per piece)

I ordered two pieces of this because I expected them to be very small, so we were surprised by these two huge pieces. They're very generous with the portions.

This was excellent. The meat is extremely tender and juicy and comes off the bone without any effort. The sauce is very sweet, almost like a honey glaze, maybe even a bit too sweet for my tastes, but absolutely delicious nonetheless.

Steamed Shanghai style juicy pork dumplings ($4.99)

We actually got these for free. When we were placing our order, the lady told us that since we had ordered over $20 worth of food, we were eligible to get these for free. What a great deal. Maybe we missed it, but we didn't see this appealing deal advertised anywhere. That's something I've never seen at any restaurant - offering free XLB beyond a certain price. It's a great idea. It's funny because we were going to order the XLB anyway.

These were quite good, unhesitatingly among the better XLB I've had in Vancouver. The meat inside was great, and there was lots of juice. The juice seemed to taste slightly different from other XLB I've had, though maybe it was just my imagination. The skin was fresh and tender and the waitress opened the basket only after placing it on the table, releasing a huge cloud of steam. Couldn't be fresher.

Southern Yangtze golden corn pastry ($5.99)

Topping off the meal was this very odd and colorful traditional Shanghainese dessert item. It's corn, fried in some kind of sugar syrup to a firm, slightly crispy consistency. They've sprinkled sugar and colored sprinkles on top. It's actually pretty good and not at all too weird - a nice dessert if you don't like your desserts too sweet.

Our bill came out to $33.10, which is very reasonable for so much good food. We even had a little bit of leftovers.

As soon as you walk in to the restaurant, the first thing you see this this huge, cool looking pot:

 

While I was busy taking photos, Kweepo took the liberty of peeking inside, and discovered something pretty neat:

They've placed bowls inside the pot on shelves. I'm assuming the bowls contain some kind of soup or broth, but I'm not sure what the purpose of placing them in this big pot is. I think this whole contraption has to do with one of the main specialty items on the menu, a kind of medicinal hot pot that you can get in a variety of different flavors, many containing medicinal ingredients like longan. I don't know whether this is functional or just for display purposes, but it's a very nice tie-in with the soup - a big pot of broth to infuse the medicinal soup with just the right earthy flavor, just as one might imagine could be seen lying around in restaurants in Shanghai in olden times. I'll be curious to try one of the hot pot dishes the next time we come.

Transylvania Flavour Restaurant

Transylvania Flavour Restaurant @ 2120 W. Broadway

Russian and Eastern European food is something I never got much exposure to, so I'm quite happy whenever I can find a restaurant of that persuasion. Oddly enough, it's easier to find an authentic Chinese restaurant in Vancouver than it is an authentic Eastern European restaurant.

I'd seen this Transylvania Flavour Restaurant often as I drove down Broadway but never actually ate there. Well, we did that a few weeks ago.

How was the meal? 100% disappointment. I don't know whether it's authentic or not, but it sure as heck wasn't good. It was a complete rip-off for what we paid. We left full but feeling empty inside. There are a few good authentic Eastern European/Russian joints in Vancouver, but sadly, this is not one of them. At least, judging by our first experience there, we don't want to go back.

Mixed Grill (bacon wrapped pork tenderloin, lamb chop, chicken breast & Transylvanian sausage, served with home cut fries & seasonal steamed veggies) $23.95

I got this dish. It was one of the only ones on the menu that actually sounded appetizing.

When it came out, it looked quite beautiful, I must say.

When I tucked into it, though, every single element of this dish was a disappointment. Uniformly, none of the elements of this dish had any flavor. It was as if they'd just thrown the things into the oven and cooked them without almost any seasoning. Everything tasted bland. It's remarkable to be able to serve a dish consisting entirely of three different kinds of meat and yet manage to make a dish that has almost no flavor. It was a waste of good ingredients.

The so-called seasonal veggies they served were also unseasoned and nearly uncooked. I had to leave them all on my plate.

The french fries were the best part of the dish.

Lamb Shank Ossobuco (tender braised lamb shank, with roasted mushroom juice, topped with caramelized onions, served with buttered vegetables & mashed potatoes) $23.95

Kweepo got this, on my recommendation. I recommended it because ossobuco is good when done properly, and I've been trying to find a restaurant in Vancouver that serves a good ossobuco to introduce Kweepo to ossobuco.

It also looked really nice coming out and got my mouth watering. However, this dish was equally disappointing. The so-called ossobuco was nothing of the sort. By definition, ossobuco is braised veal shank, not lamb shank. So it's not really even ossobuco.

But that wasn't our problem with this dish. The problem was that, like my dish, it was bland and flavorless. It had only the faintest hint of the flavor of what a real ossobuco is supposed to taste like.

I felt bad for having recommended the dish, naively expecting they would actually get it right if they have the temerity to serve it. Foiled again. My search goes on for a good ossobuco.

The veggies in her dish were pretty much identical to mine. I doubt they bothered to prepare them differently, even though the description describes a different preparation for each of our plates. It looks like they just prepared one batch and put them on both of our plates to save time.

On top of this, the wine prices were on the high end ($8-$9), as were the prices for everything else. Cocktails were between $9 and $11 and so-called "Transylvanian style tapas" a.k.a. starters were $12.

The one thing I can't complain about is the service. They were prompt, polite and attentive. I value good service, so I appreciate that aspect. However, if the food isn't good, then it's all for naught.

I came into this place fully prepared and wanting to love it. I left disappointed. They charge excessively high prices for food that is at best mediocre. If you charge a price like that, you had better be sure your food can back it up.

It's strange, because looking at the rating on Urbanspoon just now, it seems to be a pretty highly regarded restaurant. Is it possible that we caught them on an off night? Or that we chose the wrong dish? Perhaps. I would love to be wrong about these guys, because I would like another reliable source of good Eastern European cuisine. But it seems to me like a pretty bad indicator to get two fairly easy dishes like that wrong.

Atithi Indian Cuisine

Atithi Indian Cuisine @ 2445 Burrard St.

I ate at this place yesterday for lunch. It was one of the worst Indian meals I've ever had. I just had to write about it to warn people away.

My point can be summed up in one word: Tortilla.

Either they think their customers are too stupid to notice the difference between a chapati and a tortilla, or they ran out of chapatis and decided to make due with some Old El Paso tortillas.

Even the cheapest and crappiest of Indian restaurants serve fresh naan, but not this place. They give you tortillas.

The buffet, as it were, consisted of all the usual suspects, with some weird items.

The lentils were watery and without taste, the Tandoori chicken the most tasteless I've ever had, and the strange fish was pretty much rendered inedible by the peculiar sauce they used, which tasted like corn starch + tomato paste.

They didn't even have any raita that I could see. For dessert they offered some sweet rice that was bland and a pudding that turned out to be mango pudding, but was synthetic tasting and not like any Indian dessert I've ever had. It's really amazing: I couldn't finish almost any of the items I chose, from mains to dessert. Oh, and the pappadums? All broken into little bits. Not a single whole pappadum available.

You've been warned.

Good Indian food is something I've had a hard time finding in Vancouver. Well, let me rephrase that. Good, inexpensive Indian food. When I lived in Houston, I knew of any number of Indian restaurants serving a lunch buffet with a dozen items, each of them delicious and authentic, for between $5 and $7. And the buffet changed on a daily basis. I could say the same for Mexican food. In Texas, Mexican food was by definition cheap. Up here, even the most shoddy, inauthentic enchilada dish runs you $12. Pepita's at Burrard and 4th is a typical example of a place that serves crappy, overpriced Mexican food. There's no justification for this - it's beans and tortillas, not caviar and foie gras. Maybe in the past with the exchange rate there was some justification, but with the exchange rate where it is now, I find it laughable to charge these prices. (I'm paid in US dollars, and the Canadian amount was less than the US amount for the first time ever when I exchanged my last paycheck, so maybe that's why I'm a little grumpy.)

Anyway, the reason I tried this place out is because the buffet was cheap (for Vancouver), $7.99, and I don't know of any good, inexpensive Indian restaurants nearby so that I don't have to do a 40 minute drive south to Sunset every time I want to eat cheap Indian food. There's an Indian buffet around Denman and Davie called Swagat Tandoori that is probably, shockingly, even worse than Atithi. I'm amazed that after all these years it is still around. There are naturally some good Indian restaurants on Davie and on Robson, but they are absurdly overpriced. So I had high hopes this place would be good, which made my disappointment all the more bitter.

I was hopeful when Desi Lounge opened up at Denman and Barclay just near my place a few years ago, but dismayed to find the menu typically overpriced. The buffet was also overpriced and not that impressive. I tried it twice and never went back. I was really disappointed. I would have frequented the place if it was cheap and good and simple. Instead they went for this ridiculous ostentatious concept with a huge hall and fancy styling and HD TVs, etc., not at all what I want from an Indian restaurant. I want good Indian food, not chintzy glitz. It was a real shame and wasted opportunity. They closed down not long after opening because I think nobody went. It was a bad location (second floor), and they were undoubtedly paying too much for the rent.

3G Vegetarian Restaurant

3G Vegetarian Restaurant @ 3423 Cambie St.

The other day we were in the south Main Street area so we decided to go to Long's Noodle House for lunch, but we were unable to find parking, so we  had to abandon our plans and look for another place further on. Very frustrating. That's one annoying thing about this area. The parking. We swung around the back to check if they have a parking lot, and they do, but it made us laugh when we saw it. About 10 cars were jam-packed into a tiny space of around 30 square feet, and a delivery van was parked behind them all. You couldn't even walk inbetween the cars, much less park there.

So we said forget it and drove around until we ran across this vegetarian restaurant called 3G Vegetarian Restaurant and decided to give it a shot. I was a vegetarian for well over a decade, but ever since having quit I haven't visited vegetarian restaurants very often because after reverting I find them lacking in taste. When I was a vegetarian it didn't bother me, but now I find the food pretty bland. It's tough to make good vegetarian food. In Houston there were a lot of good vegetarian restaurants, so it's a good place to be a vegetarian. Here there are some, but it's more hit-or-miss.

We were intrigued by this one because they offer vegetarian dim sum. Upon being seated, we were presented with a dim sum card very much in the manner of a typical dim sum joint. Except everything here is vegetarian. It's also vegan-friendly. Dim sum is very heavy on meaty flavors, so if they have the guts to serve vegetarian dim sum, they must be pretty sure that they've created vegetarian versions that are as good as the original versions, I hoped. Turns out I was overly optimistic.

You can see which items we ordered below. The "goose" was a little expensive, but we decided to give it a shot to see if the restaurant was good with bean curd.

They also have a traditional menu with lots of items:

They were actually out of the steamed veggie shrimp dumpling. The first dish to come out was:

Deep fried veggie fish w/spicy & salt ($3.50)

This was quite good. The fish texture was fairly convincing, and the spices and sauce they used made it quite delectable. The only problem is that it was a miniscule serving. I suppose it makes sense since it's dim sum and pretty cheap, but we felt they could have put a little more on the plate. The sad thing is, the rest of the meal was downhill from here. This was the best thing we ate.

Veggie goose ($7.50) 

We were very disappointed to discover that the veggie goose was not made of bean curd at all (except for the wrapper) but of shiitake mushrooms. Shiitake mushrooms wrapped in thin bean curd skin. Very misleading to call this veggie goose. Veggie goose suggests a "fake meat" made of processed and flavored bean curd, just like they have veggie pork, veggie beef, etc. We actually felt cheated. This dish was a joke.

Mixed veggie meat puff ($3.50) 

The veggie goose wasn't typical dim sum, but it even fell short without being compared to something else. Here we have something that looks obviously like a classic dim sum. Appearance is just like the real thing. The consistency of the skin is identical. What's inside was almost tasteless, though. It's just veggies without any kind of tofu or bean curd. Very disappointing.

Steamed veggie BBQ pork bun ($3.50)

I always order steamed BBQ pork buns when I have dim sum, so I was eager to try the veggie version to see how it compares. Again, just like the previous item, the bun itself is just like the real thing, but the interior is lacking in taste. It has a tomato taste but without any body. Not at all like the real thing, and very weak flavor. Obviously a lot of the flavors of dim sum come from the meat sauces and from the use of MSG. Here they have neither at their disposal. They did the best they could to imitate something essentially impossible to imitate without the proper ingredients.

After eating all this we weren't full, but we didn't feel like ordering any more. We were too disappointed by what we'd had already. But we decided to get some dessert, because the server lady recommended a certain item that a group at another table was eating. So we went for it, because it actually sounded good. This is what we ordered:

Deep fried soy milk ($3.50?)

It has a sticky sweet exterior of crunchy deep-fried tempura-like batter covering an interior of a cold, white congealed soy milk substance. It was quite good. Except again the flavor was very weak. It should have been stronger and sweeter.

I felt that we'd made a mistake ordering the dim sum, and perhaps the items on their main menu were better. They have a large selection of items, including fake meat dishes, noodle dishes, and intriguing-sounding fusion-style risottos and rice dishes. If I was passing by, I might give one of these a shot sometime, but after my experience here it's not high on my priority list. It's a shame, because I really wanted to like this place.

I know from first-hand experience how hard it is to cook good vegetarian dishes, especially ethnic dishes where you already know what it's supposed to taste like and you have an uphill battle trying to reach a taste that is approximately similar. But vegetarians are a resourceful lot, and put considerable ingenuity into discovering new combinations of ingredients to try to eke out the best flavors they can from their more limited selection of available ingredients. Thus it makes them more creative in a certain sense. Instead of just falling back on a meat flavor, they concoct new flavors. A lot of the best cooking I've had has been vegetarian. There are many veggie restaurants I ate at that had lots of dishes with fantastic taste that even a non-vegetarian would - Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, you name it. So I don't think it's acceptable to be second-rate. Vegetarian food does NOT have to be bland.

One of my favorite vegetarian restaurants in the Vancouver metro area is this fantastic buffet-style vegetarian joint in Richmond called Veggie Bunch Vegetarian Buffet in the Richmond Public Market on Westminster Highway. I'll have to go there soon to write about them. Of course, now that I'm not a vegetarian I usually wind up going to eat upstairs at one of the many great little food stalls in the food court on the second floor, but I still find Veggie Bunch to be among the best veggie cooking I've had in Vancouver.

Best Pick: Harambe

Harambe @ 2149 Commercial Drive

I discovered Ethiopian cuisine many years ago when I lived in Houston. It was a brief encounter but left a tantalizing memory. As a child, I was a fastidious and prim and loathed getting his hands dirty playing, and I must say that hasn't changed much over the years. It went against something deep inside me to eat using my hands as utensils, but it was a pleasantly dislocating experience. More importantly, the food was fantastic - like no other type of food I've tasted, but highly refined and exploding with new flavors. You had a large variety of small servings of different dishes that you pick and choose from with each bite. The bread itself was delicious and strange and wonderful. Everything was new and mystifying and exotic.

I was happy upon moving to Vancouver to discover the town is blessed with quite a few Ethiopian restaurants. After trying out most of them, I've come to the conclusion that I like Harambe the best. Nyala on Main street is not authentic. The one time I ate at Axum on Hastings I got sick. Addis Cafe is decent but not quite as good as Harambe. Fassil on Broadway I've never tried because every time I drive by there they're closed.

I've been to Harambe innumerable times over the years, and every single time I get the same thing: The Chef's Choice Platter. I never tire of it. If you're going to try Ethiopian cuisine for the first time, my recommendation is to go to Harambe and try the Chef's Choice Platter. I feel it does a great job of conveying what is so amazing and unique about Ethiopian cooking.

The interior of Harambe is quite pleasant, too. The walls are festooned with a smattering Ethiopian cultural artifacts of different kinds as well as ethnically tinged art in different styles by different Ethiopian artists. Really very classy as well as being warm and inviting and relaxing.

This mural painted on the bar is also really cool:

At Harambe you have the option of sitting at a western-style table or sitting at a table with traditional Ethiopian seats, which are kind of like stools, and a small table closer to the ground. I always sit at the western-style tables, but it would be fun for a group looking to experience the whole Authentic Ethiopian Cuisine Package to sit at the traditional table.

They even have special Ethiopian chai tea at Harambe, which I get every time, as it goes very well with the food.

But perhaps the coolest thing about Harambe is that they make their own honey wine or mead, called "Tej". I always get a glass of this stuff when I go there. It's absolutely marvelous. Very sweet and mellow and easy to drink, I suspect it not to have a particularly high alcohol content. The fermented flavor is somewhat reminiscent of the Kombucha Wonder Drink. Rather than tasting strongly alcoholic like wine, it's more like the taste of juice that's gone a little off.

You have the choice of ordering any number of dishes that come as stand-alones, but I never do this because I would feel it wasn't worth the money. The dishes are somewhat expensive. Even the Chef's Choice Platter is fairly expensive at $12.99 for one and $24.99 for two. But at least when I order the Chef's Choice Platter I always feel like I got my money's worth due to the big variety of items. It makes for a very satisfying meal, whereas eating a big serving of the same dish would get boring.

This is what the chef's platter looks like:

(click for larger view)

It looks small, but I can assure you this is a big serving. The above is a serving for two people. Kweepo and I were just barely able to polish it all off. When you order the Chef's Choice Platter you also get a few extra rolls of injera on the side. They're very generous with the injera. I've never run out. I always have some injera left over afterwards.

Ethiopian cooking is vaguely reminiscent of Indian food in the sense that you have a variety of sauce-based dishes - i.e. meat or lentis or beans in some kind of curry sauce - that you can eat in combination with a naan and rice. In Ethiopian cuisine, they use a special type of bread called "injera", which serves as the base accompaniment as well as the utensil. The injera is like a big, thick pancake. You rip off a piece with your hand and use it scoop up a bit of one of the dishes by pinching into the mound of your target dish using the piece of injera.

Though I've never gotten used to the whole eating with your hands thing, I find it to be quite fun to eat the Chef's Choice Platter, especially as a communal activity. I know the idea of eating with your hands would put a lot of people off, but it's a real shame because the food is so good. I have this idea that if Harambe opened up a downtown location where they could make some concessions in terms of the authenticity of the experience by offering forks and knives by default and perhaps altering the presentation of dishes slightly accordingly, without altering any of the recipes, this type of cooking could become a smash hit with the lunch crowd. It's hearty, tasty, healthy and different, without being too weird or exotic. I feel bad whenever I go to Harambe for lunch and it's empty. Although the last time we went it was thankfully pretty busy.

The Chef's Choice Platter comes with a whole bunch of different items:

3 MEAT ITEMS:

- Yebeg wot (lamb)

- Doro wot (chicken thigh)

- Alitcha wot (beef)

5 VEGGIE ITEMS:

- Shero wot (ground chickpeas)

- Misir wat (red split lentils)

- Tekil gomen (steamed cabbage)

- Gomen (boiled spinach)

- Yatekilt alitcha (sauteed carrot, string beans, potato and onions)

There's also some salad in the middle, though it seems kind of out of place. It seems to be the only non-authentic element here. But I have to admit that I do appreciate having some roughage present to cleanse the palate, and at least it's good quality salad and not lettuce or something. And it does go pretty well with the rest of the dish, surprisingly.

Here's a close-up of some of the items.

I don't even know where to begin describing the taste. All I know is that every one of these is good. The chicken is my favorite, with the red lentils a close second. The injera itself is wonderful - fluffy and tender and obviously freshly made.

They also have some other items on the menu that aren't included here, notably some fish dishes, which I may have to try the next time I go.

Wang's Taiwan Beef Noodle House

Wang's Taiwan Beef Noodle House @ 8390 Granville St.

Sorry for the absence there for a bit. We got suddenly busy with other matters (especially the VIFF, as we're avid foreign movie fans) so we haven't had time to post anything in here. I know, it's bad etiquette for a food blog. We repent and will try to be more diligent from now on. But on the other hand, we've got a budget, too. I don't know how some food bloggers can afford to eat out every meal. It's an expensive way of supporting the blog-writing habit.

Anyway, as happens so often, yesterday we embarked on a singleminded quest to find a new Asian restaurant. We were starving, so we settled pretty quickly for an interesting-sounding candidate as we drove down Granville towards Richmond: A Taiwan noodle joint. We were so hungry we couldn't wait to get to Richmond. It looked good, too, with a nice spiffy new sign.

I thought it was kind of funny that they didn't even bother to provide an English title. Lucky for me I could read the characters on the sign. Only after we parked and walked up to the restaurant did we notice that the side of the restaurant perpendicular to Granville actually has the English translation. Strange way to do the sign. You don't really notice the English when you're driving by.

When we walked in we were pretty impressed. Very clean and modern interior. Obviously recently redecorated. Packed with people. Beautiful open-style wood grain finish counter.

The only negative about the interior is that the seats are packed quite close together, and the ceiling is high, so it feels kind of impersonal and uncomfortable, with people sitting right next to you on either side. Not a particularly friendly design, more just to pack the customers in as much as possible. It was indeed a very popular restaurant. Most seats were occupied while we were there.

Lovely new menu too:

OK, now onto the food.

Let's cut to the chase. Did we like it? No. I think we're just about the only ones in Vancouver who didn't like it judging by the many positive reviews at Urbanspoon. I'll explain why below. Just wanted to make my position clear. Sometimes you read a review that goes on and on and you come away frustrated because you can't tell, well did you like it or not?!

We placed our order with the waitress, who was obviously harried but still pretty friendly. For our drink we ordered a mango frappe. After about 10 minutes it came out. Slow service is the first complaint here. It took FOREVER for our noodle dishes to come out. We thought they'd forgotten about our order of XLB because they didn't come out until we were almost finished with our noodles.

As for the frappe, it came in this hilariously tall glass, which we thought was wonderful. It's a nice big serving. But the taste was too icy. It seems like they skimped on the ice cream. It tasted more like a mango slush.

For my main I got the classic beef noodle, which was about $7.

It looked quite beautiful at first sight. Nice big chunks of beef and lots of pickled greens on top, with great-looking handmade noodles underneath and nice aroma from the broth.

Then I tasted it. Something was off about the broth. It tasted like beef but nothing else. No body behind the beefy flavor. The noodles were quite good, and the beef was tender and delicious without having too much fat. Overall, this was inferior to the beef noodle I had at Beef Noodle King. Not bad by any means, but nothing to go crazy about or make you want to come again.

Kweepo ordered something called "Sour and spicy soup" for about the same price.

What came out looked at first sight like ordinary sweet and sour soup with noodles tossed in.

The noodles are beautiful! The thing is, Kweepo wasn't expecting sweet and sour soup. The phrasing on the menu was "sour and spicy soup", not sweet and sour soup. She knows what sweet and sour soup is, so she wouldn't have ordered this had she known this is what would come out.

What's worse, the sweet and sour broth had no taste. I thought Kweepo was exaggerating when she told me it had no taste, so I tried it myself, and I was shocked how little taste it had. Never in my life have I tasted a sweet and sour soup with so little taste. It's usually a reliable dish to get. You know what sweet and sour soup is going to taste like. There aren't many surprises. But somehow they managed to make this one taste like air. The noodles, as beautiful and good as they were, were completely wasted in such a bland broth. She could only slog through about half of this thing before giving up.

Finally after we were almost done this plate was thrown on our table.

I don't think you can tell from this photo, but the Xiao Long Bao (aka XLB to the cool kids) were miniscule. They're about half the size of the XLB I've had elsewhere. Not that that matters, of course, as long as they're good. And I've never seen XLB served in a dish like this. They're supposed to come served in a steaming basket, aren't they? As for the taste, they were almost cold when they came out, which didn't help. The skin was thick and doughy and hard. There wasn't much sauce on the interior. Hands down the worst XLB I've ever had. Maybe I just don't know XLB? Because apparently the XLB here are supposed to be good? I don't know but I just didn't find these very good.

Another complaint is that there seemed to be one server girl handling the whole restaurant, and so the poor girl was understandably curt.

I asked the server girl if the restaurant was new, and she told me they'd been around for 10 years. I was surprised by that. That's when she told me they'd recently redecorated. The redecoration was certainly successful. It's a pleasantly designed noodle place. Unfortunately from our cursory first visit, we found that the noodles leave much to be desired.