Shanghai Bamboo House

• Cuisine(s): Chinese
  Hours: Sun, Tue-Sat 11am-9:30pm, Mon 5pm-9:30pm
  Price: $, $$
• Payment Types: MasterCard, Visa
  Features: Family Style, Takeout
  Serving: Dinner, Lunch
• Alcohol: Beer/Wine
  Reservations: Not Necessary
  Parking: Lot Available

Description

Some of the Shanghainese dining rooms in the San Gabriel Valley may be more ambitious than Shanghai Bamboo House, some of them less so, and the restaurant seems to have found its niche right in the middle: It's not luxurious, but your elbows don't stick to the tables; it's not unfriendly to outsiders, but you get the feeling that the customers mostly know one another; and you will often see people bringing in extremely expensive bottles of wine. More to the point, although the restaurant specializes in a branch of cuisine known for sweetness, heaviness and generosity with oil, the Shanghai Bamboo House is light and graceful, balanced texturally, and fresh. You can get your enormous braised pig's knuckle, and sandy pot with chicken and chestnuts, and Jell-O-like braised sea slugs with shrimp roe, but the soul of the restaurant lies elsewhere - cold, boiled chicken that sings with salt and the gamy essence of the bird; ultralight braised tofu rolls stuffed with pork or shrimp; coins of cool, stuffed lotus root slicked with a wine sauce and stuffed with sticky rice. The braised squash with tiny sun-dried shrimp is luscious and light; the tureenful of "house special rice soup" seems almost without weight.