Shanghai Lu Restaurant — Restaurant in Vancouver

It’s been a few years since we’ve last been to Shanghai Lu on West Broadway. We were initially interested in heading over to nearby Dynasty Seafood but they were too busy so we came here instead. What I’ve never known before is that they actually have free parking located on the 4th floor of the Holiday Inn garage.

Given their name, we decided to start out with their XLB Shanghai Dumplings ($6.50). As a general rule, I usually don’t order this at non-Shanghainese restaurants because they never turn out right. The ones here were sufficiently juicy on the inside but I found that they were much too thick and doughy with the top twirl – which turned me off.

Next up was the Steamed BBQ Pork Buns ($6). They were nice and fluffy but on the small size and the bbq pork filling was rather dry.

The Steamed Chicken Feet in Brown Sauce ($6.5) was a bit cryptic… what exactly is a “brown sauce”? In any case, it was actually pretty tasty and was served with taro.

Like most of the other dishes, the Steamed Beef Rice Rolls ($7) was just okay. The filling seemed a bit on the skimpy side of things but nothing overly wrong with it.

The Eggplant with Prawns ($7) was pretty good with tender eggplant and a nicely fried prawn topping.

The Prawn and Chive Dumplings ($7) were one of my favourite items on this visit. The dumplings had a delicately crisp outer coating from being pan-fried.

The service was a bit slow given that they weren’t very busy when we visited and I found that the prices of the dishes didn’t really live up to the quality. Overall, they seem to have gone down since our prior visits years ago.

UPDATE - September 2025: It's probably been a good 5 years since our last visit here and the place has seen better days. The interior looks a bit worn and it was quite empty when we visited. That being said, service was quite helpful.

We had the Sautéed Buddha Feast ($23) and Steamed Cod with Tofu in Black Bean Sauce ($34). The...

1 STARS GIVEN ONLY BECAUSE THEY CHANGED THEIR POLICY!

Party of 8 people came here last year to celebrate Aunt's 84th birthday! We all enjoyed the food at the restaurant and we brought a small cake which the staff was happy to serve. All ended splendid! Aunt 85th birthday, enjoyed the overall experience she had last year at the restaurant that she insist on going back to celebrate with dim sum and cake. We (7 of us) get to the restaurant and asked the female manager to place the cake in the fridge like we did last year. The female manager looks at us without a smile and states we cannot eat the cake here! "What?" I said, she says they can only serve the cake during dinner session but not lunch session. This place is not a busy restaurant and I thought maybe they don't want to occupy the serving staff time with serving cake. I asked, what if we do it ourself, I don't need a cutting knife as the cake came with one, I would just need 7 small clean plates and 7 forks. Nope, she refused to do that! We ate our lunch (DIM SUM) which I would rate 3.5 STARS and at the end before asking the bill asked if we could pay extra to eat the birthday cake here, still answered NO! Only reason why I tried to offered money is because we have an 85 years old lady who actually enjoyed the whole experience she had last year and was hoping to have another enjoyable repeat. For a policy to not be able to serve a birthday cake at lunch but only for dinner , I rated this restaurant a 1. Serving staff = 4/5 Food = 3.5/5 Parking = 4.5/5 FREE / if there is space. Female Manager = 0/5 (only because of the situation...

Not worth the money.

We went today for a large group (11 people). Food was alright, came out quick and was warm. However, the service was awful at best. We asked a server who was dropping off food to cut a dish, first in English, then in Chinese. She didn't answer or acknowledge us. She began walking away and we asked again can you please cut it two more times before she turned around and snidely said "it's already cut". Maybe acknowledge your customers' questions. We had to ask for condiments multiple times before receiving them.

The only good part was one of our water glasses spilled and the male manager? was prompt and helped us clean it up. That was nice.

When it came to pay we had asked if we can just split the bill evenly between everyone and even agreed to pay the extra 1 dollar transaction fee per person for those of us using card. The woman doing the transactions tried to add two transaction fees onto someone paying 2 portions of the bill on 1 card. When we pointed it out to her, she mutter that we're being annoying and had no right to complain.

There was also 15% auto gratuity, the service was so awful 5% would have been generous....