Wuyue Xiaochu: Specializing in Shanghai Classics

It’s not always helpful to turn up to a review with a ravenous appetite, as it tends to cloud the judgment. When we opened Wuyue Xiaochu’s extensive, colorfully photographed menu (although with no English), we bubbled with excitement, calling out dishes that we wanted to order in rapid succession to the distracted waitress.

Without too much delay our anticipated dishes started arriving at the table. As the hunger pangs started to subside, however, our enthusiasm also took a dip. What began as a mouth-watering advertisement, turned into a slightly hit-and-miss representation of classic Shanghai cuisine.

For cold dishes we started with the sixi kaofu, a quintessentially Shanghai dish of fried wheat gluten in a sweetened sauce. This was especially good and we were quick to polish it off. On the other hand, the recommended zilei pidan suanhu qiezi, a dish with a fun twist that requires the customer to do their own smashing of ingredients with a pestle, was an un-enticing blend of long, stringy pieces of cold eggplant and century egg, mashed together with a dominating chunky raw garlic sauce. We will admit that perhaps our pestle and mortar skills were not up to the mark. Thankfully things improved again with the aniangdao xiangzharou, a tender, slow-cooked, deep red pork belly dish, with an intense richness thanks to a thick layer of fat.

Reaching the end of the meal, we looked to the specialty shengjianbao, Shanghai-style pan-fried buns, to balance things out. Despite their uniform puff, however, inside there was an equally uniform scarcity of meat, and the dough lacked crunch on the bottom and pillowy softness on the top. Certainly there are better shengjianbao to be had in town, even this far north of their spiritual home. Nevertheless, for an inexpensive lunch Wuyue Xiaochu is not a bad choice in the CBD area.

Daily 11am-10pm. 2/F, Bldg E, World City, Jinhui Lu, Chaoyang District (8590 6698)
吴越小厨：朝阳区金汇路世界城E座2层
700m south of Dongdaqiao (Line 6)

Photo: Wikipedia

(Editor's note: the shengjianbao pictured above are not from this restaurant.)