Hongxing Kitchen

Nov 29, 2020

Hongxing is on Ubereats with a BOGO promotion!

Noodles with Beef Balls and Tofu and soup

The beef balls were made with a lot of work since the tofu skin was a super thin layer on top of the densely packed beef. Very yummy and the noodles were great too - especially all the toppings like seaweed and green onions on top. 

Noodles with scallions and oil

It seems like a simple dish, but it was really good with lots of flavour and it was really filling. 

September 13, 2020

Shanghai fried noodles and pan fried dumplings

The take out version is as good as the eat-in version (even though the dumplings aren't as crisp - they're still super tasty and delicious with hot soup inside).

Beef noodle soup with the noodles, choy and egg packaged separately from the beef and beef broth

It was a nice DIY package for take-out since the noodles and soup wouldn't get soggy on the journey home. Everything was really good and super affordable! If you haven't tried Hongxing Kitchen, definitely check it out for yummy Shanghainese food!

May 16, 2020

Hongxing Kitchen Menu

Shanghai Chives and Pork Dumplings

Since the food court hasn't been open for eating in, we had to grab the dumplings to go (and they prepare the dumplings separate from the soup - so you have to cook the dumplings again). The dumplings are so worth it though! There's so much meat inside and they're so tasty with the clear broth.

Apr 11, 2020

Hongxing is open for take-out and now they're also on Uber Eats!

Fish-flavoured shredded pork with vegetables and rice and Shanghai Fried Noodles

I love the strong flavour of the fish-flavoured shredded pork, but it's not for everyone since it has a strong smell. It's one of my favourite dishes at Hongxing and I've really been craving it!

Pan fried dumplings

Since the stay-at-home orders started, I really miss fried food - so this meal hit the spot! Tasty fried noodles with vegetables and dumplings with a slightly crispy layer on the bottom. Yummy!

Mar 5, 2020

Steamed Shanghai Vegetarian Dumplings (with egg)

We saw someone at the food court eating these and it seemed really good. There's a lot of delicious ingredients inside the dumplings like glass noodles, assorted vegetables, egg and more. 

Inside

Mapo tofu on rice and Fish-flavoured shredded pork with vegetables and rice

Delicious! Really Flavourful and huge portions of tofu and fish-flavoured shredded pork (even though it looks small in the box). Both of these dishes taste amazing with white rice since they have such strong flavours. The fish-flavoured shredded pork is one of my favourite dishes here! 

Mar 2, 2019

Shanghai dumplings with noodle soup

6 huge dumplings and noodles with soup. 

Chicken cutlet, soup and Shanghai fried noodles

The Shanghai fried noodles are really good, I think they worked out their recipe and now it tastes much better. Hongxing Kitchen has now become my go-to place for Shanghai fried noodles! 

April 29, 2018

Pork belly in noodle soup

Yummy as usual!

June 17, 2017

Summer menu!

 Cold dumplings with peanut sauce

The wontons were pretty good and it was a different experience eating them cold rather than in hot or in a bowl of soup. The peanut sauce was pretty good too! 

Shanghai Seaweed salad, potato salad with ham and cold noodles 

The seaweed salad was really good since it was cool and refreshing. The cold noodles had the same peanut sauce as the cold dumplings and it was pretty good too. 

 

Braised Beef Noodle Soup

A really hearty bowl of tender satisfying beef with soy sauce egg and choy on top of Shanghai noodles in dark beef broth. It was really yummy, but I prefer the Taiwanese spicy version. 

February 23, 2017 

The chef had a Thursday special: Shanghai Style Salty Soy Milk

Shanghai Pork and Chives Wonton and Shanghai Style Salty Soy Milk

The wontons come in pork and vegetable or pork and chives. Personally, I prefer the pork and chives version - it has great flavour! The broth is also really good with seaweed, egg, green onions, cilantro and chicken broth. It's so good that when I finish my wontons, I will drink the entire bowl of broth. I'm used to sweet soy milk so this took me a while to get used to. Overall, I would say the salty soy milk was different in a good way since there was so much going on in the soy milk with fried dough, cilantro, green onions and other salty ingredients. Unfortunately, I kept thinking that it needed something like noodles to absorb some of the liquid and to dilute the strong salty flavour. This might be an acquired taste or I have to shatter my conventional belief that soy milk is always sweet.

February 14, 2017

Shanghai Noodles in soup with preserved vegetables, bamboo shoots and beef
They do an amazing noodle in soup. The soup is really flavourful and the noodles are really tasty.


Chicken Katsu (comes with the noodles in soup above)
Crispy fried chicken breast and there's a spicy mayo dip for the katsu (which makes it even better).

Shanghai Beef and Vegetable Wontons
The wontons are delicious! They're wrapped when you order and then made on the spot while you wait. There's a huge difference between fresh wontons and leftover wontons and you can really taste the difference. The wonton wrappers are thicker and tastier than day-old wonton wrappers.

February 4, 2017 

Shanghai Fried Noodles

The fried noodles reminded me of the best Shanghai Fried Noodles I've ever had. My favourite Shanghai fried noodle place closed down years ago - but it was my favourite food when I was a kid (we went there all the time). This was pretty close, but there was a tad too much vinegar. (Update: you can ask them to put less vinegar in). 

Pan fried dumplings and beef noodle soup

The pan fried dumplings were okay, but they were a little too doughy for me. The beef noodle soup was delightful and more strongly flavoured than the usual preserved vegetable noodle soup. However, I like the regular preserved vegetable and bamboo shoot soup base more. 

January 15, 2017

A new Shanghainese place opened in the food court at 4227 Sheppard Avenue East. It's run by a family from Shanghai: the oldest sister does the majority of the cooking with her younger sister taking orders and their parents helping out. I've been here a few times now and it's become a favourite since their food is consistently really good and reasonably priced. Also, the chef mixes things up every once in a while to keep it interesting (like creating a summer menu or adding in Shanghai specialties on certain days of the week). 

There's a great Chinese food court located in the Midtown Plaza at the corner of Midland and Finch. There's good Chinese BBQ at Lung Tung BBQ, great Cantonese dish food at Shing Kee Kitchen and now a Shanghainese food stall called Hongxing Kitchen. 

Shanghai Noodles with beancurd sheet rolls and meatballs in soup
The Shanghai noodles in soup were REALLY GOOD! The noodles were perfect - not too soggy and they were great at absorbing the flavour from the soup. The soup was this delicious pork, preserved vegetables, green onions, seaweed and bamboo shoots soup. This was some great traditional Shanghainese cooking!

Shanghai Pork and Vegetable Wontons
These were more like the Chinese dumplings than wontons, but instead of the typical Cantonese filling of shrimp, these had pork and vegetable. The wonton skins were pretty papery thin and it was almost amazing that they held together so well. The wontons were fantastic and the soup base had a lot of delectable ingredients including egg strips, green onions, cilantro, seaweed and a yummy chicken stock base. Everything was homemade and it was SO GOOD!

Overall: I would REALLY recommend this Shanghainese place - the food is delicious and super affordable. The family working here speaks Shanghainese, Mandarin, English and Cantonese and they're super nice. Definitely go try it out!

Liangying Fast Food - Shanghai

We were dropped off near the Shanghai Circus World to watch the Era show on our last night in Shanghai. Our tour guide also recommended a few places for dinner nearby, one of which was Liangying Fast Food. He mentioned that they made pretty good Xiaolongbao, so of course we had to go visit:

Order and pay first, then we'll serve you later system....

Drunken chicken

A lot of people were ordering this chicken, so we thought we'd give it a try.

I think I've been spoiled by North American Chicken: the chicken was quite bony and not very meaty, which made it hard to focus on how the meat tasted. The texture of the meat was smooth - that's about all I can say.

Xiaolongbao!!! ¥8 a long (bamboo basket)

I love Shanghai Xiaolongbao - I've been a fan since childhood and I've got to say - this didn't disappoint at all! It's a very delicate balance making xiaolongbao (inexperienced or cheap versions have a thick skin so they don't risk the skin tearing from the weight of the soup). The flour skin was translucent and thin, but it was sturdy too because the soup (and the meat) inside of the xiaolongbao never leaked out (or fell out) until you bit into it. The skin was just the right balance to bite into the xiaolongbao and get the full flavour of the meat and soup. Amazing! They really do it best in Shanghai.

Fried Noodles

I want this secret sauce they make Shanghai Fried Noodles with!!! It's so good!

This version was on the oily side, but you can't argue with the taste of the noodles - delicious!

Pork Chop and pickled vegetables Noodle Soup

The pork chop was really nicely seasoned (and it was a lot of meat). 

The noodle soup and the broth wasn't as great as the pork chop or fried noodles or xiaolongbao.

Overall: We wanted to order a third long of xiaolongbao because they were so good - but they sold out. Total cost of our meal: ¥36 for all 5 items. I think that all travelers to Shanghai should definitely try the xiaolongbao (if not at Liangying Fast Food, then somewhere else) because they really do make it best in Shanghai.

Dessert! KFC Egg tarts

KFC is a lot bigger in China than Canada...if they had items like egg tarts in Canada - I'd definitely go to KFC more often!

L: Regular egg tart and R: Peach Egg tart

The egg tarts had a runny custard taste and the skins weren't very flaky. I loved the flavour of the peach egg tart; it worked really well.

Yingqiao Homely Snack - Shanghai

After an excruciatingly long flight to Shanghai, we arrived at the Minya Hotel in Shanghai and immediately start exploring for food nearby. We found the Yingqiao Homely Snack restaurant on Boshan Road in Pudong:

The ordering system in China is a little different than what we're used to: 

1) Decide on what you want and order and pay for your food at the front

2) Pick a table and sit down (if the restaurant is packed - sometimes random people sit at your table if you have seats available)

3) Flag a waiter/waitress down to give them your receipt and so that they know which table you're sitting at

4) Wait for your food to be brought out and served 

Salty pickled vegetables and pork in noodle soup 

It's recommended that travelers drink bottled water in China rather than the tap water since the filtration system in China isn't as developed as other established countries.

We could taste the difference in the broth: Shanghai water has a weird and slightly unpleasant taste. 

However, the noodles with the pickled vegetables and pork were very tasty. They gave us a lot of noodles for ¥7 (that's about $1.15 CAD or USD!).

Pork Chop in Noodle Soup ¥10

We saw a lot of people here order the pork chop, so we thought it would be worth a try. 

It was terrible, we couldn't even finish it. The pork chop was cold and it tasted bad.

Pork and vegetable fried noodles ¥8

This was actually really good! The noodles in sauce was delicious. It's quite difficult to recreate the Shanghai noodle sauce - I swear they have some secret ingredient they all use to make their fried noodles taste amazing. The downside of this dish was that it was very oily. 

In general, Northern Chinese cuisine tends to be very oily in comparison to Southern Chinese and Hong Kong cuisine. Northern dishes have all the flavour and can be really delicious, but they just use extra oil when cooking. 

John’s Chinese BBQ

We heard the BBQ pork (char siu) is really good here and we've been looking for a good Cantonese roasted meat restaurant for a while. 

Typical for most Chinese restaurants, we got a starter soup. 

Then they delivered their most popular dish right away:

BBQ pork with rice

The char siu was really tender and sweet - I thought they used a little too much honey with their soy sauce making it a tad too sweet. However, I could see why people came back here even though it is on the expensive side. 

Stir Fried Noodles with Pork

It looked really good and it was okay for the most part - nothing exceptional. 

Shanghai Fried Noodles

I found this a little on the bland side after the stir fried noodles and char siu.  It just lacked a strong flavour (usually I like my Shanghai noodles with more of a meat flavour or soy sauce flavour, but I think all the vegetables kind of diluted those flavours). 

Overall: A decent experience - the service was quick and the food was okay. However, the restaurant didn't really stand out to me. 

Shanghai Dim Sum

March 11, 2018

Stewed pork noodles

The pork was pretty tasty - it's just interesting that it's always outside the noodle soup bowl as opposed to inside the bowl. Maybe the soup dilutes the flavour of the meat? 

Xiaolongbao and pork bao

Put next together, there's a pretty big difference in the size and portions of both! The soup filled xiaolongbao were yummy as always. The pork buns were good when you could get to the filling, but there's a lot of bao in the way. 

November 5, 2017

Shanghai Dim Sum is running a really good promotion. A basket of 4 xiaolongbao are $0.99 and each subsequent basket is $2.49 (cheaper than most dim sum places) and they also have $1 special dishes - but it's only until 11am.

 
Bean curd rolls
It's a pretty big portion, but it wasn't that tasty and it was really cold like it just came out of the refrigerator.


Xiaolongbao, steamed pork & vegetable bun, deep fried dough stick (youtiao) and the beancurd rolls
The xiaolongbao were decent - they failed the chopstick lift test, but for $0.99 - I can't really complain. The steamed pork & vegetable bun was unexpectedly huge and was a lot more flour and bun than meat and vegetable filling. The deep fried dough sticks were pretty good and even better with congee.


Pan fried onion pancake
It was pretty oily.


Shanghai sweet and sour ribs with noodles
The sauce of the Shanghai sweet and sour ribs was pretty good and the ribs were yummy.


Shanghai wontons
The wontons centers were super tiny - the wrappers in the soup made it seem bigger. There was almost no way they could compare to Hongxing Kitchen.

Overall: Decent Shanghai xiaolongbao for super cheap (or at least the first round was)! The rest of the food was pretty reasonably priced as well. The service was pretty fast as well since they had to turnover a lot of tables quickly.

Website: http://www.shanghaidimsum.ca/menu.html