Shanghai House Restaurant (No 1 Panda House) Breakfast/ Brunch

(Didn't bring my camera for this one - sorry.)

Heard some good things about the Chinese breakfast/ brunch foods at Shanghai House Restaurant (上海人家) on Guess Rd, so we decided to pay a visit. The sign still says No. 1 Panda House as its name, but officially I think it has changed to Shanghai House Restaurant.

We didn't look at any of the entree dishes because we've heard that they tend to be super oily, so we just stuck to the breakfast/ brunch items (labeled "dim sum", although there's no such thing as dim sum in Shanghai cuisine, as far as I know...)

We started out with both 甜豆漿 (sweet soymilk) and 咸豆漿 (salty soymilk). The sweet soymilk tasted very Asian, although it was quite expensive ($1.80 for a tall glass). The salty soymilk was interesting: it came with 油條 (fried dough) already soaked in, scallions, and chili oil. I was not expecting the chili oil, and thought it was a bit too oily, but otherwise, the taste was pretty good.

蔥油餅 Scallion pancakes （congyou bing)
- These tasted wonderful - very crispy but not overdone. The scallions' fragrance was also plentiful. However, I have no idea how they managed to make these so oily.

小籠湯包 Shanghainese soup dumplings (xiaolong tangbao)
- Personally, I am not a huge fan of these in the first place, plus the one I tried didn't exactly have a lot of soup in it, so I wasn't too impressed with these.

生煎包 Fried pork buns (shengjian bao)
- I thought these were great - the dough was extremely fluffy and fried to perfection!

豆沙酥餅 Red bean paste layered bun (dousha subing)
- This was very good (probably because it wasn't oily at all). The bean paste was hot, and the dough was flaky and crispy.

咸飯糰 Rice roll (xian fantuan)
- This was also one of my favorites (in fact, I ordered another one for myself later on). Inside the rice roll, they added pickled radish, pork sung, and a small slice of fried dough for plenty of flavor.

Overall, I felt that however well-made these dishes were, the greasiness was too much for us to handle. Perhaps it will be all right for some other Chinese foodies out there, but I don't think I'll be visiting again anytime soon.

Restaurant: Shanghai House Restaurant/ No 1 Panda House (Breakfast/ Brunch)
Price: Around $10