41636 Wed Nov 30 03:18:52 -0800 2005 2 1 San Francisco Bay Area 0 200939 Elsewhere on Chowhound you have read the warnings: Su Hong Palo Alto is not the same as Su Hong Menlo Park. (I believe that in spite of the rest of the menu you can get a peppery, hearty, worthwhile General's Chicken at Su Hong in Menlo Park about once a week, but I haven't pinned down the day.) I went to Su Hong Palo Alto, on El Camino Way (wonderful street name -- my son says 'The Way Way, hah hah') to try xiao long bao. A few days after leaving Shanghai, I needed to see what I could do to fill that specific pit in my appetite. As other posters have recommended, you can usefully ignore the lunch menu in English. Instead, start with the cold appetizers inside the case near the door. If you read Chinese or have a food dictionary (World Food Hong Kong is good, but sometimes frustrating, since it's focussed on southern cooking only), go through the different menus and white-boards in Chinese. Or just start asking, as I did: Do you have kidneys? Kidneys? Yes, pork kidneys. Sure. Do you want them spicy? Yes, spicy would be great. I got a well-cooked dish of scored pig kidneys, with chopped up savory Chinese doughnuts (you2 tiao2 in Mandarin) and peppers. It was not delicate at all, but very warm and hearty. I also tried the Shanghai-style spring rolls, which are on the menu. They are full of mushrooms, and absolutely the most mushroomy fried rolls I have had. A few days prior, I was happily eating at street-side stands in Shanghai and in Zhejiang province. Bay Area spots will not soon equal the convenience or value of east China's dumplingeries. But Su Hong reminded me that the xiao long bao here are worth eating. Xiao long bao. This is a cult food: pork dumplings, usually with a scallion flavor, wrapped while cold along with gelled pork broth inside a thin wheat-flour skin. It is steamed so that the broth-gel turns liquid, and you get to savor a thin envelope around a delicious soup surrounding a meatball. It's wonderful, it's messy, and most people eat it with a spoon under the dumpling in one hand and the chopsticks in the other. Happy Cafe (San Mateo) has a better xiao long bao skin than Su Hong's -- thinner and even more delectable. However, I agree with previous posters: Su Hong Palo Alto make a better dumpling and bright, slurpworthy broth inside. Yes, it costs much more than in Shanghai. Incidentally, Happy Cafe, open mostly at lunch, will gently cook pork kidneys with ginger, very different from what I had at Su Hong, and also worth the trip. Su Hong, 4101 El Camino Way, Palo Alto, 650 493 4664 Happy Cafe, 250 S B St, San Mateo, 650 340 7138 Wed Nov 30 03:18:52 -0800 2005 0 David Sloo 1 201058 I appreciate your report esp. since you've eaten in Shanghai recently. I only had XLB at Su Hong once, and they didn't give me a spoon that time, so I know how totally messy they are! Also good to know some new things to try at Su Hong that haven't been reported before. I used to like kidneys when I was small and my mom prepared them for jook, but the kidneys I've had in the US tasted funny and didn't have the same "bouncy" texture. Do you think the scoring of the kidneys is what gives them that nice texture? I see Su Hong's kidneys were scored. Is it scored at Happy Cafe? Wed Nov 30 18:01:31 -0800 2005 200939 0 Alice Patis 2 202390 Alice asked about scoring kidneys and the bouncy texture. I cook kidneys at home, and I never score them. The purpose of scoring is probably twofold: make sure no part of the kidney is too thick to cook through, and make sure that even if the kidney is tough, you can bite through it because it's mostly cut through. Instead of scoring, I slice kidneys relatively thin. At Happy Cafe, they are sliced thin and cooked gently and simply. At Su Hong Palo Alto, they were scored, sliced slightly thicker, cooked well through, still not tough. My favorite way of having kidneys is a standard Hong Kong technique, where they are sliced thin then added to a steaming bowl of juk when serving the juk. The hot juk cooks the kidneys very gently. I have had this style in Hong Kong (both in Causeway Bay and in Mong Kok) recently and at one of Seattle's excellent juk houses (on Weller, I think). Yes, they are a little bouncy this way, but pink and delicate. Thu Dec 08 13:40:11 -0800 2005 201058 0 David Sloo