A trip down Shanghai Lane yields soupy, savory surprises
Shanghai Lane is not open for breakfast — not unless you work a late shift or live a life of sleep-in leisure — but several of the items on its menu of regional staples are common morning meals in China’s biggest city. How do the Shanghainese start the day?
With deep-fried pork buns, that’s how.
“They are a very traditional Shanghainese food,” says Alicia Wu, who along with her husband, Alex Chen, and their partner/ lead chef Franky Zhang, opened Shanghai Lane back in January. All three hail from Nanxiang, a township in Shanghai’s Jiading District, and none has had much luck finding the dish here in the States.
“You can sometimes find them in California and New York,” Wu says. “But our partner lived in New York for several years and for a long time was trying to find this taste of home.”
But he couldn’t, so he decided to make them himself.
Nanxiang is also famous for its own brand of xiao long bao (soup dumplings — more on this later) but the deep-fried buns are an altogether different experience, one that with its crisp base, toothy top and tender pork center could usher the trendy soup dumpling right out of the spotlight with a searing spurt of its perfect, porky jus.
The buns are best eaten hot — and carefully.
They’re a tad large for bitesize, though I have zero doubt there are some who’d force it. You’ll want to nip it, using the spoon as a cradle to catch the slurpable stuff, before enjoying the dual textures of its house-made wrapper and fatty, gently seasoned filling.
“My husband and Franky are foodies,” Wu says with a chuckle, noting that Zhang’s cred runs a bit deeper — his dad had a traditional restaurant back home. “That’s why we decided to do the same food here in Orlando.”
They came here five years ago. Chen and Zhang were in the tourism business at the time.
“There used to be a lot of people coming from China
to Orlando, to Disney,” she explains. “But since last February and COVID-19, there are no Chinese tourists here.”
Both men lost their jobs. Time at home on lockdown inspired lots of home cooking, then the idea for an all-new business. The small location in Westside Crossings — a spot from which you could hit several notable Asian eateries with a rock — has been modernized in its morph from mobile phone store to munchery. It’s clean, cute and has been doing brisk takeout, in particular on weekends, says Wu.
“I don’t know how they found us!” she says. “There have been a few TikToks and Instagram posts, but it seems like magic.”
So, too, is another Shanghainese breakfast staple — salt soymilk soup ($4.99).
Made in house, yellow soybeans are soaked and pressed, the milk then cooked about a half hour. To this feather-light, creamy broth is added a bit of soy sauce and rice vinegar, achieving the subtlest tang. Tiny sheets of seaweed bring a pop of brine and lovely chew. There are bits of green onion, the spring-fresh bite of cilantro and soggy hunks of the eatery’s deepfried bread sticks.
These can be ordered separately, as well, for $2.99.
It is mild soup, a touch sweet and beautifully complemented by the cilantro’s herbaceous presence. A splash of chili oil or sriracha levels it up, but it’s gorgeous on its own.
The bread is also common at breakfast in Shanghai, Wu tells me, but not everything here is a daybreak standard.
Take the chopped boiled chicken for example ($8.99). Served cold, skin on, fans of Hainanese chicken will find this briny version familiar. The scallion noodles ($7.99) are generous and simple — also vegan. And the noodle soup with pork and cabbage ($9.99) is a massive serving with snappy, relish-sweet leaves and stems that are pickled in-house for two weeks.
“Shanghainese food can be a little sweeter,” Wu says. “We really enjoy sugar and often have it in vegetable dishes.” Mild broth offsets this nicely, and all the dishes I tried welcomed spicy add-ins if you’re so inclined.
You might put a bit of chili oil in the vinegar, too, before giving your Shanghainese xiaolongbao a bath therein. If you’re familiar with these purses, so popular of late, the ones from this region may still be new.
“In some areas of China, they make pretty big soup dumplings,” Wu says. “It’s like a whole soup bowl is inside it!” In Shanghai, they are delicate, petite, poppable — as long as the broth isn’t too hot, of course. It’s more common to pierce it, catching the soup and allowing the filling to cool some.
These and the pork buns, Wu says are the two things she’d most recommend to newcomers. It took them a while to perfect the art — the cast iron pan on which the buns cook is searing, its temperature regulation difficult to master. Making them is a two-day process.
“The buns…” she says, almost dreamily, in a far-away voice, “…their taste is from my childhood. Every day, before school, we bought breakfast from the street carts. This is the taste I used to have many years ago.”
She and Chen speculate they are perhaps the only place in Florida — and certainly Orlando — that can offer it. The Shanghainese customers who have found them, she says, agree.
For them, Shanghai Lane doubles as memory lane. For others, like me, it’s a path to delicious new ones.
If you go:
Shanghai Lane: 5034 W. Colonial Drive in Orlando, 407-985-3684; facebook. com/ShanghaiLane/
Want to reach out? Find me on Twitter or Instagram @amydroo or on the OSFoodie Instagram account @orlando.foodie. Email: amthompson@ orlandosentinel.com. Join the conversation at the Orlando Sentinel’s Facebook Forum, Let’s Eat, Orlando.