Shanghai Taste is famous for its xiao long bao. The handmade soup dumplings, filled with savory meat and broth, have created such a demand, the Chinatown favorite has expanded into the southwest.
But believe it or not, it took years for co-creator Joe Muscaglione to convince chef Jimmy Li that they would sell. The restaurateur met Li in 2008 as a customer in his then-restaurant and stumbled upon the xiao long bao.
“He had a restaurant called Three Villages … and I ate there. It was really, really delicious,” Muscaglione recalls. “Then when I left, because you could park in the back, I looked in the kitchen and I saw people making xiao long bao. So I went back inside and said, ‘You make xiao long bao here? How come you didn’t tell me?’ He was surprised I knew what they were.”
Li wasn’t sure how the unassuming street food, often eaten for breakfast in his native China, would be received. It was kept under wraps for 10 years—all through the operation of their former restaurant, Niu-Gu—until the business partners were invited to move into Shanghai Plaza in late 2019.
“We kept perfecting the recipe the best we could and tweaking it,” Muscaglione says. “And then when Shanghai Plaza opened, we [didn’t know] what to expect. We’ve been overwhelmed by support from both tourists and locals alike.”
Fast-forward five more years, and Shanghai Taste has opened a second location on Rainbow Boulevard and Windmill Lane. At 1,000 square feet, the kitchen is much larger than the Chinatown location, which was built for “a quarter of the business we do,” Muscaglione says.
The extra space will allow the southwest location to offer dishes the Chinatown location can’t. Some of those include the bean curd noodles and shrimp XO sauce ($17), which has a delicious chili flavor, and the Shanghai crispy shrimp ($17), a dish cooked with the shells on for an extra crunch. There’s also Li’s version of a beef stir fry ($17) with bell pepper, onion and oyster mushroom in black pepper sauce.
Available at both locations, the spicy wontons in chili oil sauce ($11) offer a hearty option.Shanghai Taste’s signature fried chicken ($8) is also juicy and satisfying. And its baby bok choy, sauteed in garlic, ($14) refreshes the palate.
Muscaglione says they’re preparing the southwest location as a “centralized base” to dispatch large batches of xiao long bao to the Chinatown location. For now, Li is traveling between the two locations as the keeper of the sacred recipe.
“Our recipe is so secret, none of our dumpling makers that you see in our kitchen knows how to make the xiao long bao filling. Even with Jimmy Li himself, until we opened, only his mom knew it. We guard that secret,” he says.
SHANGHAI TASTE SOUTHWEST 8060 S. Rainbow Blvd. #130, 702-661-3689. Daily, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
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