Shanghai One
Unit C – 1872 Merivale Rd., 613-686-1380, shanghaione.ca
Open: Sunday to Thursday 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Prices: most main dishes $12.95 to $18.95, more for seasonal and deluxe seafood
Access: no steps to front door or washrooms
We entered Shanghai One, a huge restaurant in a mall at Hunt Club and Merivale roads, thinking that it looked very familiar. The menu, however, was dotted with mysteries.
Previously in this 6,000-square-foot space there had been another Chinese restaurant called Bashu. It had been open for less than two years, serving seafood, Sichuan and Cantonese fare, dim sum and more in a space that was as glitzy and big-box as some Somerset Street West Asian restaurants are down-at-heels and hole-in-the-wall.
Shanghai One, which opened this fall, has retained the opulent look of Bashu as if it took over in turnkey fashion. Strikingly modern, ostentatious chandeliers hang above the bright dining room packed with black tables and narrow, cloth-covered chairs. At the back of the room, a large mural showing Shanghai’s skyline is new. The best proof that Shanghai One is not simply a rebranded Bashu is in the menu, which specializes in dishes from Shanghai, China’s largest city, buttressed by less esoteric Cantonese and Northern Chinese dishes, as well as dim sum staples.
There is, of course, a longstanding restaurant in Chinatown called the Shanghai, but its fare includes crowd-pleasing Chinese-Canadian and Asian fusion dishes. At Shanghai One, adventurous diners and Chinese expats can delve into more representative and even daunting dishes in which eels, sea cucumber and Dungeness crab (in Shanghai. the local hairy crabs are prized) are the stars.
When I’ve visited Shanghai One and looked around to see which dishes the more knowledgeable eaters had ordered, I’ve most often seen bamboo steamer baskets filled with piping hot dumplings on the tables. These were what the menu refers to as “Shanghai juicy meat dumplings,” otherwise known as “soup dumplings” or xiao long bao. Inside each dumpling’s thin yet sturdy skin was a ground-pork filling mixed with gelatinized pork stock. The usual trick for eating these treats is to place a dumpling in one’s soup spoon, bite off its top, slurp out some of the soup and then anoint the rest with a bit of black vinegar before downing it. At Shanghai One, the xiao long bao were a highlight, and the best I’ve had in Ottawa, meaning not only the tastiest, but also the least likely to leak their liquids.
Xiao long bao soup dumplings at Shanghai One
Those dumplings struck me as easy-to-like appetizers for old hands at Shanghainese eating and novices alike. Also accessible, if less tasty, were the overgrown, steamed “lion’s-head” pork meatballs in broth ($3.95 each). More challenging were Shanghai-style smoked fish ($10.50), a white-fish cousin to hot-smoked salmon, but soy-flavoured, more dense of texture and riddled with little bones, and Shanghai-style sautéed shrimps ($10.95), which came with shells and heads on, their crunchy exteriors sweetly flavoured, the shrimp meat inside less so.
Lions-head steamed pork meatball at Shanghai One
Smoked fish appetizer at Shanghai One
Shanghai-style sauteed shrimps at Shanghai One
Other Shanghainese dishes that we tried supported the generalization that the city’s cuisine tends to the oily, sweet and salty. A server recommended stewed pork cubes and tofu skin in brown sauce ($15.95), which consisted of morsels of unctuous belly meat and enjoyably chewy tofu skin in a predominantly sweet sauce. Mindful of Shanghai’s love of eels, we tried a bowlful of eel meat, despite its steep price ($28.95), and found that the rich, flavourful fish stood up to its sweet-salty sauce.
Pork cubes with tofu skin in brown sauce at Shanghai One
Sauteed eel at Shanghai One
To offset all of that protein, we opted for the simplicity and neutral taste of noodles with blackened scallions, oil and soy ($10.95), and garlicky snow pea leaves ($13.95), a bowl of which was massively portioned and generously sauced.
Noodles with scallion, oil and soy at Shanghai One
Dishes at Shanghai One pix by Peter Hum
We had hoped to try Shanghai-flavour scrambled eggs, after being told that the dish somehow mimics the taste of crab, but then we were later told that the dish wasn’t available, perhaps because the cook who could make it wasn’t in the kitchen. We might have opted to try a sea cucumber dish, but we were told immediately that the kitchen was out of that delicacy.
I’ve tried a few Sichuan dishes to see if there would be a spin on them at Shanghai One. Ma po tofu (the classic spicy mix of silken tofu and ground pork, $11.95) stressed the tingle of Sichuan peppers, but was less rounded and savoury in flavour and less viscous and more oily in texture. Fish-flavoured eggplant ($11.95) supplied jangling flavours and its sweet note was clear.
Ma po tofu at Shanghai One
Fish-flavoured eggplant at Shanghai One
General Tao’s chicken ($12.95) was not good — too soggy and saucy and more sweet than spicy. An order of Cantonese fried noodles ($12.95) was massively sized, but pedestrian.
General Tao’s Chicken at Shanghai One
As for a la carte dim sum here, the dumplings and rolls that we had one Saturday for lunch were generally not that refined, and included hits and misses. Deep-fried squid and other deep-fried items were surprisingly good, as were some well-seasoned pork ribs, but steamed dumplings were less consistent, and the worst of them were bland and already sticking to the bottom of the steamer. A fried scallion cake was overdone and oily, The dim sum dishes were also a little pricey for what we got.
Fried squid at Shanghai One
Salt and pepper ribs at Shanghai One
Rice rolls at Shanghai One
Barbecue pork buns at Shanghai One
Green onion pancakes at Shanghai One
Service here has varied from friendly to brusque, although the shift in demeanour may have varied with the amount of English the server spoke. Dishes generally arrived quickly from the kitchen.
The restaurant is licensed. Except for the egg tarts in the dim sum section, there seemed to be no desserts.
Egg tarts at Shanghai One
On its website and signage, Shanghai One touts itself as a fine-dining destination. That’s overstating things, I think, or at least valuing its decor over its dishes. I’m glad for its distinctiveness — sweetness, oiliness, and all — and there are dishes and dumplings I would happily eat again. However, those are in the minority.
phum@postmedia.com
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