Chinatown Brasserie

We woke up this past Sunday a little too late because of the spring ahead change in time. The plan was to go to Chinatown for dim sum but we figured it was already too late and most of the good stuff would be gone.

Instead we headed down to Chinatown Brasserie where we knew we could get some good food, albeit more expensive.

We walked in around 1:30 and the place was packed! The entire waiting area was filled and there were no empty table. Luckily there were a couple of open stools at the bar.

I decided to try out one of their cocktails and ordered a Bellini martini.



This was little too sweet for my tastes. There was way too much peach puree and not enough prosecco. I wouldn't order one of these here again.

For starters we got some pan fried crab, shrimp and spinach dumplings.



These were a little bland. I was expecting a little more flavor from the crab but there was hardly any inside.



I'm not usually a big fan of the sauce they send it with so that didn't help. I thought the skin would be nice and crispy since it was pan fried but I guess I was wrong.

For our main dish we ordered the Crispy Orange Beef with orange zest, chili's and grand marnier.



This was excellent. The beef had an interesting texture of both crispy and chewy that I really liked. The sauce had a hot and sweet orange flavor that was wasn't too rich and syrupy like most places you get it. I really enjoyed this dish.

We also ordered some soup dumplings which would have been great except the dumpling dough itself kept sticking to the steamer. Every time we picked one up the dumpling would ripe and we would lose precious drops of soup. I'm not sure why this was happening but it kind of ruined the dumplings. 

Overall I did enjoy our meal. If the dumplings hadn't had the ripping problem they would have been spectacular. And I did enjoy having a fancy atmosphere for eating dumplings. It's a good alternative for those days when heading to Chinatown proper just isn't in the cards. 

Chinatown Brasserie