Thin Skin, Beautiful Filling

After reading about it in a couple of articles, I went to Family One (一家人) for dinner. It's a small Shanghai cuisine restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui. Wow, definitely worth the visit. Their trademark Xiao Long Bao ("Little Dragon Bun" dumpling) is the epitome of 皮薄餡靚 (thin yet firm skin, totally juicy filling).

I love that they served small portions because that meant I could order more dishes

The proper way to eat these it to nibble off the top and then drink the soup inside first. Damn, I want to find out the recipe for that soup. Not only tasty, but remarkably un-oily.

Seeing how it was 30C + 70% humid today, I ordered some summer feeling stuff. Like this deep fried rice with shrimp and tomato sauce:

YES!!! Finally found another place that serves pickled vegetables buns. One of my favorite lunch places at work used to serve these but they stopped a while back. There's such a fantastic complementary thing going on between the rich flavor of the marinated and pickled vegetables and the simple, steamed bun.

And what Shanghai meal would be complete (at least for me) without fried "pot sticker" dumplings? Another aromatic hit. The top of the dumpling was nice and thin and the bottom was fried to just the right amount of crispness.

Lots of other stuff on the menu I didn't get around to trying ('coz I ordered a second serving of the Xiao Long Bao) so I'm definitely going to visit this place again in the near future.