Yuan’s Shanghai Serendipity Cuisine

Food is average — try it if you’ve never been here. Décor was pretty amazing. Has an old vintage feel.
Food
XLB — was pretty standard. Juicy in the middle but wasn’t amazing. Just kinda… standard.
Tofu/​veg appetiser — has pine nuts. It’s a decent little cold dish. Seasoned quite well.
Lamb dish with green onion — uses hot pot sliced lamb. Meat was tender. Nothing really of note about this one.
Long beans — they use the thicker beans. I personally prefer the thinner variety. Comes on a dish that makes it look like the plate is pooping. Best I can describe that…
Spicy Cauliflower — I don’t really take photos for Unilocal.But this was like next gen cauliflower. Ma lat spicy sauce with cauliflower, chili and bamboo shoots. Comes served on a flaming plate. Neat.
Red bean pastry — pretty nice. Crispy, and not oily.

All the food we ordered are great. I am not a Shanghainese so I can’t rate on the authenticity. There are a lot of dishes I have never seen but they all taste wonderful and well made. It is a little pricey but it is good quality food. Service is good too even though the wait persons seem a bit too busy to pay attention to everyone. Kind of surprise to see so many 1 star review

I have no idea why there are such low reviews
I think it’s cause it’s a new place and when a place opens up it has slow service
But when I went the food was some of the best shanghaiese food in town
I eat a lot of Chinese food and Asian for for that matter
Being Chinese I know good Chinese food
I’m not a gut that orders combo B
so when I recommend a good Chinese place it will be good
And this place is good
The dumplings were some of the best in town and they had traditional dishes like salted duck egg yolk rolled up Im duck meat
Everything we had was very authentic and good and I would compare this place with Shanghai river which I consider to be the best Shanghaiese place in town

This restaurant serve just okay Shanghaiese food, their Shanghaiese style fries noodle or rice cake are quite good.
Xiao Long Bao is not very good, pork isn’t fresh enough, so it had those strange smell.
Dumpling is quite good, deep fries rice cake isn’t crispy enough.
Other dishes I think is just so so. You can definitely find other places serve better dishes.
Anyways, it still worth a try but make sure you have to make reservation.

We heard some good reviews about this restaurant and also about poor service. So we came with certain expectation. We sat down and ordered about 8 dishes. Cold dishes arrived very quickly. But the hot dishes are rather slow. After about an hour of waiting and talking to various staff we decided to cancel the remaining orders and leave. The quality of food appears to be good if you are not hungry or in a hurry.

A group of us, Randomly picked this place because we were across the street in the mall. I didnt even look at their reviews which is not the norm. We were greeted as if i shouldn’t have been there. The hostess lady was very rude and said i cant eat there cause they are booked. No further explanation and she jumped on the phone as if we were not standing there. It happened for the best i guess as we found a fantastic restaurant around the corner called Dragon View Chinese Restaurant. As a foodie, it was one of the best meals i had all week in Canada. Don’t waste your time here as the other review show, the food is average it looks like.

This is my favorite XLB restaurant in US and Canada now! Forget about DTF and the long wait.
But, call for reservation here is a very good idea.
The interior was clean and elegant.
The food selection is authentic and tasty.
The service is the weak link.

I tasted the worst zhenjiang bone in my life. It is dry and overcooked. The dishes is small and expensive. We waited for 45 minutes for dishes. The waitress and manger were in black face.

The XLB was super tasty, the beef noodle had a great kick to it. The service needs to improve.

Came here with my family for Chinese new year. We had the pork spare rib soup noodle, xiao long bao, and red bean paste pancake, among a few other dishes. The bread that we got and the *small* serving of pork spare rib that came with the soup noodle tasted like they had just been unfrozen and were very bland. The xiao long bao was a bit better but still nothing special. In my opinion the best part of the meal was the red bean paste pancake. Overall, the food was very mediocre and I would probably go somewhere else for the price.

Best XLB I’ve had so far!
They’ve updated the décor since the last time — it has a nice traditional feel to the place (minus the bright blue chairs). Some smaller rooms on the side are great for private parties.
We ordered a variety of dishes: XLB, pan fried noodles, wontons (spicy and in broth), chinese pancakes, pan friend steamed buns. The XLBs had great flavour — the skin was very thin but didn’t break. The rest of the food was mediocre — it’s not as flavour able as other Shanghai cuisine I’m used to.
Would definitely recommend the XLBs!

Summary: great food, good service, somewhat pricey. Would give 4.5 stars if possible.
Every dish we tried was authentic, per my Shanghai-​raised wife.
Crab XLB had plenty of juice, proper wrapper thickness, but slightly less crab flavor compared to Top Shanghai.
Wife especially liked the flavorful and moist smoked fish.
Drunken chicken was fresh and tender. Flavor was tasty and on mild side.
No problem with early reservation or table service. Maybe prior reviewers noticed growing pains, or have replaced problem staff? Will definitely be returning.

Came for lunch and it was really well decorated in old Shanghai style décor! Nice velvet chairs and fancier cutlery and bowls. Got the shao long bao, green onion pancake, tan tan noodles, split pea tips and another beef noodle in soup. Everything was tasty !

I love their soup dumplings, but they provided small amount of ginger. –_​_​– I like their decorations because its makes me to feel about Shanghai back in an old time. Their services were good. But, I was tired to raise my hand getting refill my teapot, and nobody noticed me until 5 or 10 minutes. Like really?! At least 3 or 4 people, they were passing my area and didn’t notice me or empty teapot. Geez~~~

We came here for a family lunch.
The décor is old style Shanghai with dark wood and old Black and White Movie playing in the big screen TV in the main seating area, there were side rooms for private parties.
The food is average, the size is SMALL and price is high. So you are paying for the fancy décor with the price of food.
The XLB is juicy and is served 6 per order. The meat inside is not very tasty and the soup is only mediocre.
We had the Smoked Duck, regular order is ¼ size, we ordered half a duck, for a cold dish it was decent.
The Cold Wine Chicken tastes good with a subtle wine flavor, again the regular order is ¼ chicken, we had to upsize it.
The Green Onion Pancake is very good.
We also had the Wor Wonton Chicken Soup served in a large terrine. You can’t go wrong with Chicken Soup
We tried the Crispy Wonton Taro Soup also, this is an interesting soup with Deep Fried Wonton in the soup. Interesting flavours.
The Stewed Pork dish was cooked nicely, again the small size is annoying.
Our usual Cold Shredded Chicken with Noodle Skin was so small, we barely had a bite. They put spice in the peanut sauce so if you can’t eat spice, this is not the dish for you. Other places do not have spice so its easier for the kids.
There is an attendant at the adjacent parking lot so there was ample parking if you were going to the restaurant.

The reservation system is horrible. We had gone there with a reservation for 6pm but were told that our table wasn’t ready. That was very strange considering the restaurant was half empty. The rude lady at the front said that our table was still occupied by people who have been there since 430pm, and that is our table. Meanwhile other people were being seated at empty tables. Wow, are you kidding me?

Yuan’s Shanghai (YS) just opened two weeks ago. They did a great job remodeling the place in the style of «Old Shanghai». This review will provide a comparison with Shanghai River (SR), another favorite restaurant of mine.
Tried YS’s Xiao Long Bao’s (dumplings) and found them to be slightly better than SR’s. The outer skin of the dumpling is thinner and less chewy compared to SR’s.
We also tried their noodles (forgot the name) and liked them better than SR.
YS’s deep fried sweet and sour rock cod was not good. It was deep fried for so long that there was no meat left on the fish! We spent the entire dinner trying to find the meat! SR has a much better sweet and sour rock cod.
YS’s green onion pancake was also deep fried for too long and found to be chewy. I prefer SR’s green onion pancake, which are softer and with more dough.
YS’s Peking Duck was above average, but we did wish there was a bit more meat on each piece of duck skin. SR wins the Peking Duck contest.
All in all, we enjoyed our dinner and will go back for the XLB, but will stick to SR for everything else.