New Shanghai, Chatswood Chase

In my previous post about New Shanghai in Lemon Grove, I vowed to also review the one located in Chatswood Chase. Nevertheless, I will try to make the post brief, as I do not wish to sound repetitive.

Although they belong to the same franchise, the two branches of New Shanghai are operated quite differently - made evident by their overall presentation. The Chatswood Chase branch is more upmarket, playing on ambience and (of course) higher prices.

We were a fairly large group and wanted to have dinner around 7.30pm. They don't take bookings, so when we found that it was already full, we had to wait for about half an hour.

Waiting for a table...

Just as with the staff in Lemon Grove, the English spoken is very basic - we had someone with peanut allergies who wanted more information, and it was quite difficult extracting whether or not they use peanut oil (no, they don't. They explicitly state which dishes contain peanut).

The scope of menu caters to westernised taste-buds - as seen below, they offer dishes like spring rolls and salt and pepper squid.

Tea is not free, unlike the one in Lemon Grove. Since it just felt wrong paying for Chinese tea, I opted for the taro milk tea, which was thick and refreshing - quite a novelty as I don't recall the Lemon Grove branch offering a wide range of drinks.

Taro milk tea

 One of the first things to arrive was the string bean dish. It was pretty salty, contained a lot of garlic and the beans tasted slightly old, but when eaten with the other dishes made a good garnish. The Shanghainese noodles were (as usual) somewhat tasteless and lacking in something (like chilli oil). The rest of the dishes were fairly standard,

Stir fried string bean with dried shrimps and soy sauce ($12.80)

Salt and pepper calamari

Pan fried pork buns x 8 ($9.90)

The pan fried pork buns are fairly similar in taste to the one in Lemon Grove, but these ones were soggier and not as crisp.

Spring rolls

Fried chicken

They gave us the bonier parts - there was plenty of meat, but it meant that it wasn't as dry as what you would expect from chicken breast.

Overall, New Shanghai in Chatswood Chase bears strong similarities to the Lemon Grove branch. However, they charge you for tea, the dishes are pricier, the quality of the food (based on making comparisons between dumplings) is lower, and the menu is less 'Asian'.