Prior to the early-1990s, Richmond, British Columbia was essentially a small fishing village on the outskirts of Vancouver. After the transfer of Hong Kong from the British to China in 1997, several hundred thousand Hong Kong citizens as well as others from other regions of China and Taiwan emigrated to the west, many of whom ended up settling in the Richmond area. Today, Richmond has a somewhat similar feel as the San Gabriel Valley outside of L.A with its never-ending series of strip malls loaded with a wide array of Asian shops and restaurants. Only here, Asians easily outnumber anybody else by a wide margin (23% of the approximately 200,000 residents in Richmond are originally from Hong Kong while 27% come from other regions of the People’s Republic of China.
82% of the total population emigrated from China as well as from other parts of Asia).
To visit this area without an agenda and do it proper justice would require heaps of time, to say the least. My initial interest in going to Richmond had everything to do with seeking out its large number of restaurants serving xiao long bao. We were able to hit 3 places which, going into it, I would have thought was on the light side. But realistically, with everything else that diverted our attention such things as izakaya bars, Hakka restaurants, and large shopping malls filled with nothing but Asian stores, this ended up making complete sense.
Special thanks to Tapler for giving us a head’s up on the great XLB at
Chen’s Shanghai Kitchen in Richmond. Unfortunately, we were planning on hitting it on the way out of town but ran into some snags that day. The pictures he provides of their XLB do look fantastic. I look forward to going there someday in the near future.
Of the 3 places we tried for XLB in Richmond,
Top Shanghai was the most enjoyable. This would have been amongst the best crab/pork XLB I’ve had anywhere, with its elegant and unctuous soup which lightly coats your lips (a nice sign of any well made stock), matched beautifully with its equally elegant pork/crab filling. The filling was airy and light but didn’t lack boldness of flavor or have an empty mouthfeel. Unlike so many other places that use tasteless crab or just don’t add enough of it to make its presence known, these were almost over-the-top. My main beef about these dumplings was with their wrappers and how long they steamed them. Just from their smell, you could tell that they were yeasty and slightly undercooked; mildly similar to the aroma you get from raw pizza dough. Strangely, however, the filling tasted thoroughly cooked. These were beautifully transparent wrappers which were clearly made with the utmost of care.
Overall, these were first-rate soup dumplings and I suspect that the undercooked wrapper issue is not a regularly occurring flaw there. Everything else about them was done with too much care to believe otherwise.
The 2 other places we tried, Shanghai River and Shanghai Wind, have been fairly well documented elsewhere in cyberland.
I found the XLB at
Shanghai River (we had a basket of both pork as well as pork/crab) to be in what seemed to be a culinary purgatory. Many aspects of their dumplings were stellar. The soup was ever-so-subtlely fatty and rich while the crab/pork fillings had an amazing crabmeat-to-pork ratio, unlike most other examples around.
The trouble we had with these dumplings, though, came mostly from their construction. Like Top Shanghai before, the thin and translucent wrapper’s were
slightly undercooked, unfortunately causing these beautifully made XLB to break open almost without exception when attempting to remove them from the basket. I think everyone at the table found this to be highly annoying. I was going to say that we should have such problems with the XLB here in Chicago, where, bar none, the wrappers are so comically thick, you practically need a jack hammer to crack them open . At the Phoenix restaurant where the skins are thinner than other Chicago makers, breakage still inevitably occurs because they have a tendency to cram their oversized dumplings into the basket. They inevitably touch each other, fuse together while enroute from the kitchen to the table and then break open while you try in vain to separate them. Talk about frustrating, especially since the XLB there have
some redeeming qualities (decent soup, ok fillings) but only by Chicago standards (“tallest midget in the circus” principle is in play here.).
Overall, I really liked these dumplings; much better, I believe, than everyone else at the table that day. I would cautiously recommend them with the hopes that the wrapper problems we experienced on this one visit would be unusual.
The crab component of the mixture was so high that it literally had a shredded consistency to it instead of the usual firm dumpling appearance found at most other places.
Shanghai Wind is a modest place and so are their XLB. Thin-skinned with a slightly toothsome wrapper, these small, micro-pleated XLB contained a luscious soup and fairly nondescript pork filling.
I enjoyed these dumplings quite a bit but kept thinking that in Richmond’s vast world of xiao long bao, these must be just plain ol’ good (to v.good) examples by local standards.
Top Shanghai120-8100 Ackroyd Road
Richmond, B.C. V6X 3K2 Canada
(604) 278-8798
Shanghai River7831 Westminster HWY, #110
Richmond, B.C. V6X 414 Canada
(604) 233-8885
Shanghai Wind6610 No.3 Road
Richmond, B.C. V6Y 2C2 Canada
(604) 276-1780
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
Pretty good piece on dim sum including the name
