Shanghai Asian Cuisine

14 Elizabeth Street
New York, NY 10013

212-964-5640

Early this week, Grub Street led me to the Village Voice posting about seriously serious soup dumplings in Manhattan. My local place is great, and I’m lucky that it’s on my street (Radiance Tea). The dumplings are fresh, not oily, and always taste of comfort: a food-lover’s chicken noodle soup. But I have been noticing of late, as they cool, that the wrapper might be on the thick side.

The Village Voice post gave me hope for a new spot. They said that the soup dumplings were made with a care that is long forgotten in the popular soup dumpling. The wrapper is thin and precious, making you take all the more heed as you gingerly remove them from the steamer. When the bottom bursts, you want to cry because the soup, the soul satisfying soup is slipping down the basket slats.

The suggestion of crab meat was also of note. In Flushing, before the DOH closed the haven where I tried my first soup dumplings, slurping diners could choose between pork, or pork & crab. I don’t know why, but the tiny addition of crab adds a balance to the soup, to the meat, to the whole thing.

Off I went for 14 Elizabeth St. I parked my bike (not on the fence. There is a very firm sign about chaining bikes to the fence) and headed in. The staff was welcoming and the food came quickly.

Soup dumplings and scallion pancakes first. The scallion pancakes were ultra-thin and fried to crisp. There was just a touch of dough in the center.

The soup dumplings. Well, they were all I’d been dreaming of. My only concern was that they appeared immense sacks of soup. Instead of my usual hole in the top/side where I slurp soup and hope for the pain that comes with boiling goodness, I had to attack and drain from both sides. Not to worry, the meat was still a single mouthful and I came to regard these giant dumplings as a 2 for 1 deal on soup. I win!

The pan fried pork dumplings had a thicker wrapper than I’d anticipated, but instead of being gummy, they were comforting. There was an herbaceous vinegar-soy sauce to dip them in that I could easily fall in love with.

Finally, because I can’t resist when they are on the menu, rice cakes. We had beef fried rice cakes and if you read MeetAndEat often, you might remember that rice cakes are disk-like, rice-based noodles with a chewy texture. That first time, it took a minute to get over the shape/ingredient/texture surprise. I now adore them. The beef was nice wrapped up in a shred of the scallion pancake.

The ladies would not stop pouring tea. Endless tea. They let us sit comfortably digesting for as long as we liked after we had ceased to inhale food. Quick, friendly service, not super-cheap but reasonably priced and dreamlike soup dumplings made Shanghai Asian Cuisine one of my new favorite spots. Headed down, I was disgruntled at how far #14 is. From Houston to the very bottom People. Headed home, I was thinking “it’s not so very far, my bike and I can come down here all the time!”