5 Best Dishes at Shanghai Asian Cuisine

• Are the shrimp and watercress dumplings as good as at the late lamented step-down Sweet & Tart?  If so I'm on my way.

• 1. That's not a clarification, it's a correction (of an error). 2. You haven't corrected your post. WTF are you waiting for?

• The XLB are indeed very good here, but the ones at Nan Xiang in Flushing are decidely better.

• I quite like this place, but although the XLB are very nice, thin, and delicate, they strike me more as a cantonese conception of soup dumplings -- and in fact all of their food seems similarly skewed -- and they remind me of the sort of XLB more typically found in Hong Kong than in Shanghai.  Not a bad thing at all, and I do like this place, but if one prefers richer and less subtle XLB, these won't likely wouldn't be your first preference in my opinion.

• Thanks for that clarification, ace.

• Elizabeth Street is not "the most ancient part of Chinatown." That honor goes to the bottom of Mott Street from Chatham Square up to Pell Street. That's the block where Chinese immigrants first began to cluster in the late 1870s and where New Yorkers first tasted Chinese food in the mid 1880s. Over the next decades, they gradually expanded east on Pell and up Mott to Canal. Elizabeth Street came much later.

• Haven't tried the pancake at 456, but the crab soup dumplings are definitely better at SAC. At SAC, though, the entire upper half of the Shanghai menu is missing (pork shoulder, meatballs, etc.)

• How would you stack this against 456 on Mott Street? I"ve to say, SAC's red bean pancake looks much more appetiting than the one I tried at 456 (though cheaper at the latter location).

• I agree -- should have been six best dishes. Also loved the snow pea leaf dumplings.

• You missed the shrimp & watercress dumplings? They're amazing.

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