Shanghai Blue: Arcadian, Birmingham

Shanghai Blue

Date of Visit: 14^th September 2013

Ambience

It had been a few years since I last ate in the Arcadian but for dim sum, I remembered the place upstairs to be decent but as we entered, I realised it had changed names, design and possibly management too.  The interior was a lot darker, with solid looking dark tables and matching coloured chairs – it felt like the revamp was aiming for a more modernised feel, as opposed to traditional Chinese which is fine but it makes me wonder if it is more catered to the Western audience.

Food

We sampled a number of dishes: Prawn and chive dumplings, shanghai pork sil lung bao, Schezuan spicy dumplings, prawn cheung fun, fish congee, vegetable spring rolls and steamed custard sponge.  The prawn dumpling skin was a little dense but otherwise the filling was good, the shanghai dumplings were a flop – I clearly wanted to compare it to the ones from Beijing Dumpling and to prove my theory correct and I wasn’t wrong… the ones here at Shanghai Blue were a disappointment since the inside juice left the dumpling before you even picked it up and the skin was thick so double flop in my eyes. 

On the other hand, the Schezuan dumplings were tasty and had a good kick to it – they were basically pork wonton in a spicy broth served with pak choi.  I hadn’t realised how big of a portion this dish was until near the end as there were only two of us eating it and I had at least 5 pieces so at a guess, there must have been about 10 pieces in a portion.  Thumbs up!

The prawn cheung fun and the fish congee were good but the congee would have been tastier if it was served with cut up doughsticks (as opposed to crispy wonton skin which lost the crispiness as soon as it was soaked up by the congee).  Apparently, congee looks and tastes like GRITS in the US – never heard of it in all my adventures to the US so will keep my eyes peeled on the next trip.

I didn’t try the spring rolls since I wouldn’t choose fried food for dim sum but apparently it was good.  As for the steamed custard sponge (a bit like ma lai goa but with thin layers of custard resembling layered cake), it was nice but we waited until the end to eat it and unfortunately by then it was already cold but it would have been great if eaten whilst hot.  School boy error on our part!

Service

It was pretty quiet when we entered since it was pre-noon so we got served drinks promptly.  Towards the end of the meal, it got busy but service was not affected as they had a fair few servers.  Food arrived pretty quickly and more or less all at once so there were no long delays as you sometimes can get during the peak of dim sum time.  One small thing was that we felt eyes constantly on us from the servers waiting near the kitchen entrance which so happened to be by our table.

Summary

Food was fine here and reasonably priced (total meal was about £34 for three of us) – the only real disappointment was the Shanghai dumplings – everything else was decent.  You don’t really have too much of a choice for dim sum in Birmingham so perhaps the standard is good for the area but I have friends who are regulars to Chung Ying Garden so that might be worth a try too.