Shanghai Renjia Cafe

met up with an old friend a few days ago for lunch. was supposed to go with Angelic Scamp too but her dentist's appointment was too overextended for my hungry tummy so i went with Sleepyfish first.

i call him that because i think that's his email ID or something, and it sums him up nicely :D


so i wanted to try this place that was really near to where Sleepyfish works. It's a cafe off Jalan Keretapi, i think it's after the Digi building, right opposite where the old PBK entrance used to be. ah, sweet memories. and by the way i did NOT drink beer ok! that is warm chrysanthemum tea served in that particular glass for some weird reason.


i've been wanting to try this place for ages, as it belongs to China Aunty, whom i met at Bestie's granddad's house a couple of months ago. we had a very stilted conversation in Mandarin, as she can't speak anything else, but i found her to be a very nice lady and promised i would try to drag Bestie and Lausai for lunch there one day.

the interior of the cafe is very nice, it's open air (which means no a/c :P) and is not overly cluttered. even the window opposite (where you can see the bright sunshine) has been covered with some nice cloth thingy that has a village scenery which doesnt feel too tacky (or maybe i wasn't sitting close enough to observe properly :D)


Bestie and Lausai's cousin works there, and he told us all the noodle dishes were pretty alright, so Sleepyfish ordered the pork noodles while i had the mushroom pork noodle. each noodle dish comes with a small bowl of seaweed soup which was quite yummy and the noodles tasted quite good, quite firm and not too floury or oily.

i ordered the mushroom pork noodles cause that's my favourite thing to order at Jade Tea Pot but i think Shanghai Renjia's version is better because of the larger servings and less oil used, which makes it not taste so 'jelak' :D both the noodles were rm4.50 each, so quite cheap for me. the service was quite fast too, we got our noodles in under 10 minutes, if i recall correctly.

i thought this was cool, its a huge poster of one of the (hutongs?) in Shanghai. looks like you could just step right into it ;)

China Aunty also recommended the 小龙包 (xiao long bao) so we chose the 小龙汤包 (xiao long tang bao) which has crab meat and soup in it. the 小龙汤包 was about the size of half a tennis ball, quite large and we got 8 pieces for RM10.

Sleepyfish warned me not to eat it straightaway as the soup was super hot and would probably spew all over the place. he told me that usually they would have a bigger spoon, almost like a ladle for eating this. i've not had much experience eating 小龙汤包 but it tasted really really good, except that the filling had a slight "te hian" smell to it. the soup was really comforting and nice on a cold cloudy day.

Sleepyfish was very smart, he bit off a small section of the 包 skin and let the soup flow into the spoon. the tang of the accompanying vinegar with sliced ginger cut down the rich flavour of the 包 nicely. we each had about 3 and couldn't take anymore, so left some for Angelic Scamp who came a little while later. she WHINED for a bit but finally ate them. forgot what you said la. drop me a comment if you remember ya :D

later that night i went to Koko's for dinner as usual. and as usual, after a big fat meal, she loves to stuff me with more food so she brought this out. it's crunchy bites of fried dough with pork floss stuffed in it, all the way from Sabah. Tasted reaalllyy great~ :) we brought some back home and someone is now a great big fan :D

Happy Birthday in advance to Lausai!!!

sorry for the boh-sim-ness feel of this post. i give no reason for it, it's just one of those days :P