Ye Shanghai

This is not your typical Shanghainese restaurant. In fact, I didn’t even order the XLB here! Now that I think about it, I probably should have. Anywho, they offer an upper scale, finer dining experience than a typical Chinese restaurant. Pricing isn’t extremely high but is a bit pricier. The portions are also smaller. We ordered a few appetizers and the most memorable one was stuffed crab. I hate that their menu isn’t that descriptive. At least it wasn’t descriptive in English. So I could only guess that the crab was stuffed with crab meat, along with egg whites. Also their tea-​smoked eggs were quite tasty! I’ve never had this before and it’s not like the tea soaked eggs. These were soft boiled and has an interesting smokey flavor. Not quite like tea. Not sure how to best describe it – you should just try it! As for everything else, they weren’t really mind blowing. And service was also better than most, but still not fantastic. But for some reason, I wasn’t expecting it.

my first time having HAIRY CRAB. I’m glad I had it here because I was told it’s so much work to eat hairy crab for little meat. They have someone, who’s specific job is to dissect the hairy crab for their patrons. Wonderful! I can’t imagine working for such little meat. They were delicious though. After the crab, we were given some ginger tea drink. It’s to counter the coolness of the hairy crab. Delicious drink.
We’ve had other dishes on the menu and everything was very good, DRUNKEN CHICKEN, TEA EGGS, CENTURY EGGS etc.

I came here for dinner last night to satisfy my craving for Shanghai food, and this place is excellent!
The quality of the food is great, and they pretty much executed all of the dishes (‘cept for one) really well!
I have a love for Shanghai Tea Smoked Eggs, and after sampling them from various restaurants in HK, I’d say they come pretty close to being one of the best (I personally reserve the trophy to Island Shangri-​La for this). They were cooked perfectly to that creamy-​half-​cooked consistency (the Chinese like to call 溏心). It’s finished with a smokey flavour! It’s pretty rare for restaurants to prepare duck eggs in Vancouver (and presumably North America), so sink your teeth into these bad boys while you’re in Asia!
Other than the smoked eggs, the other appetizers that we ordered were great! These included:
1. Sliced pork terrine served with Zhejiang black vinegar — sometimes, a lot of places will serve you this dish where half of the pork is really the jelly, but this dish consisted almost entirely of pork, while still surprisingly retaining its tenderness! Well deserved!
2. Huadiao wine marinated «drunken» chicken — this dish had an strong (or overwhelming) wine flavour, so if you’re looking for a more subtle wine flavoured chicken, you might want to opt for something else. But the chicken was very tender, nonetheless!
3. Hot and sour soup — I didn’t have any, but my partner really like it!
For our main dishes, we ordered:
1. Tofu braised with hairy crab (蟹粉豆腐) — This was one of their seasonal menus (given that it is hairy crab season). Silky, smooth tofu paired with the fresh, creamy, rich taste of hairy crab meat and roe, ugh, it’s so good!
2. Hairy crab stir fried with bean sheets (蟹粉粉皮) — This was also another dish off their seasonal hairy crab menu. Basically it’s your glass noodle sheets stir-​fried with hairy crab roe. Upon first bite, this dish tastes lighter than the braised tofu dish, but after a while, you’ll be reveling in crab roe goodness (all absorbed into the bean sheets).
The only dish that we didn’t particularly feel was the Sautéed string beans with bamboo shoots.
All in all, Ye is a great, classic Shanghai restaurant that focuses on quality. I’m definitely a fan and I’ll be back!
Note: Make sure to call and book a table, for both lunch or dinner, because I’ve been turned away as a walk in on a lunch day, and they were a full house by the time we finished dinner at 8 pm.

Came here for luncheon on a business day. The hype of the restaurant is good and even close to western, table is a tad too small if you have a big lot of people. The food is excellent and the price is not too pricey given it is located at the centre of the business hub. You would see most of the restaurant customers are ladies, usually a bunch of them so it could get noisy at times! But overall a pleasant restaurant and worth a frequent visit.