restaurants

Shanghai Red

Shanghai Red is a huge Chinese food mecca just recently opened up in Chadstone Shopping Centre. With a large spacious interior that suits a traditional family gathering or a smaller, more intimate affair, Shanghai Red is yet another Shanghainese restaurant that engenders a delight and nostalgia in me like no other spot in Melbourne. The good fat: Xiao Long Bao is 110% Shanghai’s most celebrated, globalised dish so it really is a must get whenever I’m at a Shanghainese restaurant. Delighted by the multitude of various flavours offered at Shanghai Red, we contentedly tried the traditional, the truffle, along with the crab and pork styled dumplings. Unsurprisingly, the traditional one ended up being our favourite, with its classic, paper-thin skin, and a mouthful of juicy deliciousness inside. Aside from the Xiao Long Bao, the sweet and sour barramundi and salted egg prawn was another one of our favourites. Sweet and sour, a sticky, tomato-based sauce drenched over a one-pot-deep-fried barramundi, this isn’t a dish you want to think about the calories for! A tough, crispy skin with tender, fleshy fish inside. Whilst the salted egg prawn had a similar contrast in texture, the subtle saltiness outside from the egg yolk coating always ticks the boxes for me, especially if it’s fried to such perfection. The bad fat: Whilst I appreciate the creativity and luxury-chasing incorporation of truffle Xiao Long Bao in the menu, the inherent simplicity of flavours that Xiao Long Bao is meant to represent is lost with the eccentricities of truffle blended within the pork. It was definitely a weird taste and probably not something I’d try again, nor I’d recommend to those who love a normal Xiao Long Bao. FAT-O-METER: 4/5