The restaurant opens at 10 am on the weekends and there was already a line when we arrived at 9:50 am. You can make reservations online--stand in the left line or you can sit at the bar if you have no reservations--stand in the right line. When we finished our lunch, there was no line at all. Surprising because when the restaurant opened 2 months ago, there were 4-hour waits.
House Chicken Soup--$8.50. This is a very simple soup but so full of flavor with ginger. What amazed me is that the broth is so clear.
Chicken Fried Rice--$9.25 for white rice, $1 more if you want brown rice. I didn't care for this. It was greasy and there was too much green onion.
The star of the show--pork xiao long bao (soup dumpling)--$8 for 6 pieces. My husband thought the skin was thicker than at their other locations but I liked it. The pork filling was juicy and flavorful.
Add vinegar to the ginger and dip your XLB in it. Pick the XLB up at the top so the skin doesn't break and leak the juice everywhere. The juice is the best part of the XLB.
This is the big controversy. At the Santa Clara location, each basket only has 6 XLB whereas in the rest of the locations around the world, you get 10. At the Arcadia restaurant, we used to pay $5.50 for 10 XLB but that was 6 years ago. In Seoul, Korea, we paid $9 for 10 XLB in 2013.
2016 07 24
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