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.