My mom met a friend in Richmond a couple weeks ago and I went with her, so we went for lunch after. Yay, that means I don’t have to pay! After they threw out a couple suggestions, such as Dinesty Chinese Restaurant, which I nixed because I’ve already been there a lot, we ended up at Top Shanghai Cuisine instead.

The restaurant was still full, as we arrived after 1pm, so we waited a couple minutes for a table to clear up.

Sometimes, Asian (I’m not saying Chinese because other nationality restaurant also apply here) menus have the funniest and worst typos/translations.  Funny taste chicken? I was tempted to ask my mom if we could order that, but decided not to as we had company.

Tien-tsin cabbage in strrch? I’m not sure what to make of this. Who wants to translate the chinese below for me?

So I don’t know what this is on the menu, nor the English name, but I can try to describe it. It’s deep fried gluten in a sauce. Kind of sweet and salty at the same time.  Usually I eat this stuff with congee, but we had neither that or rice, and this was the first dish to come.

Assortment of vegetables and seafood with a fried egg, on top of rice. You could say that this was the filler of our meal.

This was delicious! Shredded cucumbers, chicken and crushed peanuts, with a spicy/peanut sauce. Mix it together or else you’ll be left with a lot of sauce on the bottom. I nearly devoured this by myself.. heh.

You can’t go to a Shanghai restaurant without getting their Xiao Long Baos, it would basically be a crime.  How good a shanghai restaurant should be judged by this, with two factors to judge. 1. How much soup is inside, and 2. How THIN the skin is.

I nearly burned myself on the first one I bit into, which is good, it means there’s lots of soup inside! I tried to show how much was inside with the picture below but it doesn’t work that well…

Pan Fried Shanghai Dumplings, similar to the Xiao Long Bao but not the same. There’s two things to look for when you order this, the bottom is a nice golden-brown color, crunchy in texture, and soup inside. Oh and that the dough is cooked all the way through of course.

1. Golden-brown crunchy bottom, check!

2. Juicy soup? Check.

I don’t know how much any of the items are, I didn’t order nor did I even see the bill.  I would go back again, for the shredded chicken dish and the pan fried dumplings.