Lin Chinese Cuisine and Tea House

My sister told me she sees Lin’s Chinese Cuisine and Tea House pack full everytime she pass by. That’s’ the only excuse I needed to go visit and have a feast there.🙂 I was there during peak hours for dinner but the restaurant was not packed at all. However, the take-out line was never ending. Lin’s is a Chinese restaurant specialize in Shanghai cuisine.

As starters, we ordered Beijing style chicken fenpi (mungbean pasta) salad ($7.99). Fenpi (mungbean pasta) is a noodle with a chew texture. It is transparent in colour and has no taste. This is a cold “salad” dish with cucumber, chicken, and a spicy savoury sauce.

The first thing you would do to this salad dish is to mix it well. This is to ensure the fenpi gets the sauce.

Another starter I absolutely love is the pan-fried green onion cake ($4.99). This is a very thin pancake made with a dough that has green onion mixed into it. No filling inside. The green onion gives a very nice flavour and smell to the pancake. It is very addictive. However, there is not enough green onions in this one. A little disappointing but it is not a bad green onion pancake. (Sorry about the blurry picture)

I must say, I can never get enough appetizers in Shanghai cuisine. The most classic and most popular one must be Xiao Long Bao (Shanghai juicy pork soup dumpling) (.99). The best xiao long bao must have a very thin dumpling skin that is not soggy (over-cooked) but not too thin that it will break when you lift it up. The key is to be able to put the whole dumpling in your mouth so you can taste the dumpling and the soup together. Bite of paradise. And Lin’s aced this dish.

Enough of appetizers. This is something new, I never tried before. In Chinese, it is call 全家福 ($19.99). 全家 means whole family. 福 means happiness. This is a big pot of soup, and the idea is to have a little bit of everything to resemble wealth and happiness in the family. But to make it easy. this is basically a hotpot soup supreme.

The soup base is mainly made with homemade chicken stock and Chinese ham (dried salted ham). There’s a lot of ingredients including minced pork balls, Chinese cabbage, and up to 3 or more types of dumplings.