I start the day with desserts: an appetite-revving mango-chile pop from the Paleta Bar nearby and hot, fish-shaped taiyaki filled with custard from SomiSomi a couple of buildings over.
But it gives me time to wander the complex. Lesson learned: Sign up for the Yelp wait list ahead of time. I show up for lunch on Monday at 12:30 and a staffer quotes me an hour and 15 minute wait. I’m naive about Shanghai Taste’s popularity. Wonderful Shanghai-style appetizers - kao fu (braised wheat gluten with a honeycomb texture, paired with wood-ear mushrooms), refreshing bean curd noodles served cold in scallion oil, sweet-and-sour pork ribs - round out the meal. Soup dumplings can suffer from all sorts of engineering issues, but Li’s are structural paradigms: thin yet sturdy wrappers, heavy with broth, with twisted tops that pop off easily for slurping. Shanghai Taste’s xiao long bao are the biggest draw. Shanghainese chef Jimmy Li and business partner Joe Muscaglione opened noodle house Niu-Gu together in 2016, but they’ve found an adoring audience in their new venture. Its culinary centerpiece, Shanghai Taste, hides inconspicuously among rows of lookalike facades look for groups gathered outside, waiting for seats or to-go orders.
Among the grander entrants, Shanghai Plaza opened in 2019: It covers a sprawling 57,000 square feet with a warren of two-story buildings adorned with red brick columns. Given the district’s dominant architectural themes, it also tracks to explore Chinatown by shopping center. Follow those with her textbook mapo tofu, the silken clouds adrift in a fiery sunset of Sichuan peppercorn-infused oil. Hungry for a burger? Among the Japanese-inspired creations at Fukuburger, my go-to is the Karai, slicked with avocado cream and habanero kabayaki and crowned with pickled cucumbers its flavor-texture interplays are at once sharp and soothing.ĭumplings? The choices overwhelm, but I have a clear starting point: China Mama, where Ivy Ma excels at sheng jian bao, a cluster of pan-fried pork buns bound in a web of glassy, lacy batter. Can the whole family agree on Korean barbecue? 8 Oz Korean Steakhouse mixes and matches smart combinations of meat - say, boneless short rib, beef belly, pork jowl and gently spicy pork bulgogi - in various sizes and price points, with the very modern inclusion of cheese fondue for dipping. Unlike the deep historical contexts of Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco and L.A.’s rebuilt New Chinatown, Vegas’ counterpart was founded with intention as a pluralistic business community in a real sense it’s designed to be surveyed by cuisine. It blasts more fermented pungency than plenty of versions I’ve tried in the SGV. “You should get the stinky tofu too.” I take her playful dare, and I eat it with pickled vegetables between bites of beef roll and soy milk. “Oh, so you like Taiwanese food!” she says. When I order o ah jian - layered with textures in a swirl of omelet, oysters and sweet potato starch that firms into a gel when it cooks - it amuses our server. The long menu channels many of the most popular sunrise street foods in Taiwan: oblong baked savory pastries filled with ropy threads of pork or egg or braised beef and mustard greens turnip cakes, steamed dumplings and jiu cai he zi (pan-fried hand pies plump with sliced leeks, scrambled egg and vermicelli noodles) variations of fan tuan, its tubes of sticky rice filled with greens or meats and, on almost every table, bowls of hot soy milk with long, crackling youtiao for dipping. (Maria Alejandra Cardona / Los Angeles Times)Īt breakfast, with the temperatures outside already rising, the destination one morning is a booth in the back of Taiwan Deli’s cool, dark room.
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