"Best" Shanghainese place in the SGV?

Any recent Shanghailander reports?
Seems to have changed names to Shanghailander Palace
And from where I sit, it does seem more like the Western Suburbs of Palm Springs than the SGV :smile: but was damned good in the past.

it’s on my list as originally being where the folks who run shanghai bistro started before they went back to china. rumor has it ownership changed hands recently but i can’t confirm that.

I went about three weeks ago and the place was packed.

The braised pork was still delicious as ever. My beloved eggplant with shrimp paste was decent, but they skimped on the shrimp paste and added bonito flake. Because of such a thin layer of shrimp, the bonito masked any and all shrimp flavor. The sauce was good but the eggplant was a little dense. Sheng jian bao was subpar.

Service was odd. Young guy who sat us straight up had an apricot in his mouth, eating while seating us. Took forever to order, other than that, it was fine.

I may go back again and order differently with more adventurous eaters.

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I love their braised pork! :slight_smile:

Shanghai Bistro will close by the end of this January.

In other words, one more day.

Sigh Thanks for the update ipse. I managed to miss that Emperor Noodles - mentioned earlier in the thread - had closed. It became Q38 Noodle House.

i lament the passing of shanghai bistro, emperor noodles, not so much.

I’m just reporting, not commentating :wink:

Just a name change from what I know.

Thanks ipse. I wondered about that, but on the surface there seemed a lot of other changes. I didn’t recognize anyone there, plus there have been some menu changes as well.

did an article ever come out? i’d be curious to read it.

Not yet. Many of these are simply my bandying about potential ideas, many of which get put aside on a shelf, sometimes to be forgotten.

i’d have definitely ordered the apricots to mess with him

I find it interesting that if you ask for a favorite Sichuan, the consensus is either Chengdu Taste or Sichuan Impression (with a few others mentioned as a notch behind)…

Dim sum is usually Sea Harbour and Elite, again with a few others occasionally mentioned.

…but when it comes to Shanghainese, there seems no consensus amongst FTCers. Everyone seems to have their own favorite and it’s rare to get even two votes for any one place.

I don’t think this is the consensus anymore.

Post a query, and let’s see.

That’s because there’s nothing to differentiate the various Shanghainese places in LA. You can say they’re all equally bad or equally awsome. But they’re all pretty much the same, both in terms of quality and variety.

Now when it comes to Sichuan food, the reason why Chengdu Taste or Sichuan Impression are lauded as the “best” is owing more to the fact that they are different than the majority of Sichuan restaurants.

Does that make them better? Not necessarily. Sort of like if you been eating nothing but Leo’s pistachio gelato all your life and all of sudden someone gives you a scoop of chocolate ice cream, you may have a momentary epiphany that “wow, fuck, this is great shit” when all that your synapses is really telling you is “hey, buddy, it’s just different shit, not necessarily great shit”.

perhaps. but i’d vote for anything involving the original owners of wang jia who came back and founded old shanghai kitchen which morphed into shanghai bistro with a more prep-beforehand bistro type menu. the level of execution on their dishes i found to be consistently good (when they had the ingredients on hand, but logistics/ inventiory control is separate from culinary skjlls). shanghai dumpling house displays a similarly high level of execution IMO< but suffers from a limited menu. shanghai (restaurant) makes a chicken/chestnut i’m quite fond of, but their XLB are quite pedestrian. the three places in prospect plaza offer XLB of similar quality, but the rest of their menus suffer from varying levels of execution IMO. the place in monrovia, i rated it as so-so. southern mini-town, only been a few times, but wasn’t as impressed as i was when old shanghai kitchen was still extant.

i’d say more, but i’m headed out for the evening.