This may be a shock to some people, but there is much larger
variety of Chinese cuisine. Shanghai
cuisine is quite different from its Cantonese counterpart, which is served in most Chinese restaurants. And
I was so happy to hear that there is a couple of places that served this kind of food in
Rockville. One of them is Shanghai Taste.
I actually have driven past the location of this restaurant many times before during high school to my club swimming practice at the Rockville pool at the end of the road. But it was only in 2012 that this placed opened, replacing an old Chinese takeout. This is another example of a hole in the wall as there are at most 20 seats in this restaurant. There are two menus here: one with takeout style food and the other with
This food isn’t new to me or my family. My mom likes to order certain dishes to
gauge the quality of the restaurant, such as Shanghai chow mien, hau fu, rice cake, and soup dumplings, if offered. I don't know why she does it that way, but I went with it.
To start, we had hau fu and smoked fish. Both are cold dishes.
Hau fu is a vegetarian dish. It contains gluten, wood ear mushrooms,
shiitake mushrooms, and bamboo shoots. It’s
amazing and apparently labor intensive to make.
My mom tells me of how her aunt or my grandaunt, originally from
Shanghai, used to make the greatest hau fu ever. Mom never knew how it was made. My guess is that the ingredients are cooked down, marinated, and chilled in the savory sauce for about a couple of days.
The smoked fish is fried, cut up into steaks, and then
covered in a savory brown sauce. The
fish was really good with all of that sauce, but filled with a lot of little bones. I ended spitting out the bones while eating this. This dish isn't for everybody, but if you can tolerate fish bones, it's a must have.
Next came the Shanghai chow mien and stir fried rice cakes.
Personally, I didn’t find anything
special about the noodles. It was just egg noodles stir fried with Chinese broccoli and beef. But the rice cakes were actually quite good, albeit very greasy. It's served with bean sprouts and pork. Cooking this requires precision and
skill. The cakes are very sticky, so
they must be soaked well or else it will be impossible to cook them. The wok is then well oiled to ensure that the cakes won't stick.
The main event was the soup dumplings served with ginger
infused vinegar, the quintessential food of Shanghai. They are filled with pork and gelatinous
soup, which liquefies during steaming. Wow,
this was just unbelievably good. The dumpling
skin is thin, but is still able to hold the pork and liquid soup. The soup is light and aromatic. Although this may look simple, eating it is an art form that requires specific directions to be followed:
1.
Place the dumpling in spoon.
2.
Pour the vinegar into the spoon with the ginger.
3.
Nibble the side of the dumpling and suck out the
soup. If you take a big bite, the soup
will splatter all over you.
4.
Eat the rest of the dumpling with the vinegar and ginger.
To my surprise, my dad ordered a special dish, Hainan
Chicken Rice. It’s half a deboned fresh, not frozen, chicken in soy
sauce, served with rice cooked in chicken broth and fat, ginger and chili
sauces, and seaweed soup. The chicken
was absolutely fresh and delicious. The skin very loose and quite gelatinous, which is caused by the chicken being shocked in ice water
after cooking. It was so good that my dad got another order for carryout. To me, this is one of my favorite dishes ever, along with the soup dumplings.
They only prepare 5 chickens a day, or 10
orders. This is not on the regular menu. It’s on a red sign written in Chinese near
the front door.
Our dessert was a pastry filled with red bean paste and pine
nuts. I was really amazed by how flaky the
pastry was. The bird's nest texture of the outside is really cool. The pine nuts did surprise me since I didn't realize that pine nuts were used in Chinese cooking. Or that there were any pine trees in the Shanghai area.
Personally, I would come here just for the soup dumplings and the chicken rice in
the future. It’s very authentic, just like the way they make it in Shanghai. I don't know how many people order the chicken rice, but there's a reason why it's the national dish of Singapore. There are many more dishes that are good as well. Shanghai is also known for noodles in soup, which this restaurant has plenty of.
Shanghai Taste
1121 Nelson St
Rockville, MD 20850
