San Gabriel Valley mainstay balances delicate Shanghai-style dishes with ferocious Szechuan spice.
Openings: Lunch & Dinner daily
Features
- Parking lot
- Dress code: Casual
- Kid-friendly
- Reservations suggested
Lake Spring Shanghai Restaurant Restaurant Review:
This Monterey Park restaurant helped to ignite the local craze for Shanghai cuisine. It’s an inviting space, with green carpets, yellow and brown walls, and a potted bamboo plant on every canary-yellow table. The only modern touch is a flat-screen TV that shows sports at night. The noisette pork pump is justifiably famous, a quivering mass of hog rump. Peel away a thick layer of pork fat to reveal luscious meat, ringed by a moat of brown sauce and spinach. Stir-fried rice cakes are crusty from the wok, tossed with baby bok choy, onions and squiggles of pork. Steamed Shanghai dumplings are filled with orbs of pork and a spoonful of pork juice. There are intriguing seafood iterations, too, such as crab with spicy salt. Popular favorites are all done well, from Peking duck to orange peel chicken and walnut shrimp. For dessert, the restaurant serves the hard to find "eight treasures," which includes balls of sticky rice topped with lotus seeds, almonds, red dates, sweet bean paste and candied fruit, all finished with a sweet syrup.
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