The table setting at 456 Shanghai

For no particular reason, we ended up in Chinatown on a Saturday afternoon. We had walked into Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge, dropping in on some playgrounds we’d never been too. (we’ve been reviewing playgrounds for our site, Brooklyn Playgrounds, ever since our toddler was big enough to play in them, and pursue new ones every chance we get).

Toddler tuckered himself out on the playground and after stopping off at a bodega for a bottle of milk, he promptly fell asleep. By that point we were down under the Manhattan bridge debating on lunch options. Dumpling hot spot Super Taste had a line, so my wife suggested hitting up 456 Shanghai Cuisine.

A few weeks earlier, my wife had a group dinner at the restaurant. It was part of an ongoing dinner party series created by OutSnapped founder Nicky Digital who hosts interesting people for conversations and gossip. He’s been a long-time customer of the restaurant and knew all the right things to order, plus each guest picked a dish. That’s the best way to sample a big menu, and 456 Shanghai Cuisine has a pretty big selection.

The first 456 Shanghai operated in Chatham Square – that’s the intersection off the Bowery and East Broadway, Worth Street, and Park Row – in the 1970s. The first restaurant closed sometime that decade or a little bit later. That’s long before the internet kept a record, and the New York Times hadn’t yet gotten there.

The current 456 Shanghai was opened around 2010 or 2011 by Zhou H. Li, the grandson of the original shop owner. Peter Cherches, at Word of Mouth, who had also eaten at the original location, had a meal at the new restaurant. He ate dumplings and small plates, known back then as appetizers. He enjoyed the soup dumplings, xiaolongbao, but also noted these were new to the current iteration of 456 Shanghai.

In August of that year, New York Times reviewed showed up, parroting much of what Cherches wrote about the restaurant. Sam Sifton lauded the restaurant for embracing the feeling of the Chinatown everyone thought lost, implying a kind of informal, casual place with good food and small checks. Like Cherches, the Times praises the soup dumplings and pot stickers.

Dumpling discourse peaked in the early aughts. That’s when you could still get 6 dumplings for a dollar in many places in the Lower East Side. The last of those closed a few years ago, although that’s not to say dumplings aren’t trendy. We ended up here because Super Taste had a long line, after all. But we’re in a distinctly different era of dumpling eating.

With the toddler fully asleep in his stroller, we rolled into the place at the witching hour between lunch and dinner. With just two of us eating, we were never going to finish more than a few dew dishes, but we set to work anyway.

We got a lovely table overlooking the street. There’s no better argument for congestion pricing than watching street traffic from a restaurant window on a Saturday afternoon. The place setting is in fact a classic of Chinatown restaurants, and the server brought over tea before we ordered.

The scallion pancakes came out extra crispy

We started with a scallion pancake. I’m sure there are more interesting things to eat but I love scallion pancakes, and its a thing I’ve tried, and failed to make successfully at home.

These were particularly delicate and flaky with a super crispy exterior. Maybe I’ve just been eating too many take-away scallion pancakes that they have been allowed to grow limp, but I found these particularly tasty.

Check out the close-up of this texture:

A close-up of the exterior

The next thing to arrive were the vaunted soup dumplings. And they lived up to the hype. The dumpling’s soup filling is a brothy, umami flavor, but also slightly sweet. It’s easy for a soup dumpling to simply flood the mouth with liquid, either burning the tongue or spilling everywhere. That’s part of the pleasure. But the flavor of these was good.

The dumplings themselves have a good structure to them too. They were delicate, but didn’t rip apart. They also held up to biting slightly into them and sipping out the soup without the liquid cascading across the plate.

Soup dumplings are not necessarily visually interesting but they tasted great

I suggested we order some minced pork over noodles. These were quite savory, and had a rich flavor with a very healthy sauce-to-noodle ratio. The cucumber texture was a bit flaccid from whatever they are dressed in, but were fine, if superfluous.

The minced pork over the noodles was filling and savory

We finished off with Szechuan beef. Sure, maybe not the best choice for a Shanghai-centric restaurant, but to be honest the name on the storefront is 456, and only later did I learn it was actually known as 456 Shanghai. Anyway, this beef dish was great too. It was vegetable heavy but I was surprised at how much I liked the daikon.

The Szechuan beef was rich and flavorful, although vegetable heavy

By the time we were wrapping up the dinner crowd had started arriving, tables began to fill. I particularly appreciated the lone man at the table next to us who ordered dishes by describing them to the waiter, having had them at the restaurant before. Yes, the red sauce, the waiter assured him. He had a few plates of food, and I could imagine his leftover lunch was going to be fantastic too.

We had some leftovers too, and I happily ate them the next day as a snack. It was almost as good as at the restaurant. 456 Shanghai feels like the kind of place that should have long lines, and maybe we just got lucky.

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If you like reading about dumplings, we also at a dumpling shop, QXY Dumpling, in Chicago’s Chinatown last year. We had a few different varieties, and probably ordered too many. The soup dumplings were different, but also good.

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