Rain Modern Chinese Cuisine has been on my list for a while now and I finally made it there yesterday: a GORGEOUS, warm, sunny September day. Rain is right in the middle of the Lark Street neighborhood, which is really a fabulous area of Albany. Great neighborhood. Great vibes. So many places to eat/shop/etc.

First: Rain is a beautiful restaurant. The bar, the dining room, the entrance up the stairs from Lark Street with the glass wall of water. Really lovely. The dining room is a corner with windows around both walls looking out onto the street. I sat at the bar which is big, roomy, very nice comfortable seats. There was a TV. I do like to have a TV at the bar when I’m on one of my epic lunch outings.

My approach to eating out is to try as many different things as possible. Especially when I am trying a place for the first time. Rain was kind of perfect for that because they have a pretty extensive small plates section. I don’t eat beef, pork or poultry and there were plenty of choices for me without those.

I started with steamed shrimp dumplings and edamame dumplings in broth and fried jumbo shrimp with honey walnuts.

And here’s where we ran into trouble. The two main “issues” with the food I had at Rain were lack of flavor and really not great sauces. There are two things in American Chinese cuisine that make or break the dishes: fresh ingredients and REALLY GOOD sauces. The sauces I had at Rain were not good. At all.

The first sauce I encountered was on the fried jumbo shrimp with honey walnut. Now the fried jumbo shrimp were PERFECTION. Hot, crispy, perfectly fried with just the right amount of breading. Each was tapped with one excellent walnut. The problem with the dish was the sauce, which was clearly the “honey” part of the dish and had the thickness and sweetness of the icing you’d get on top of a cinnamon bun. Yikes. WAY too much. ON a variety of levels.

The steamed shrimp dumplings had great texture and filling and were each sitting in a little bit of sauce that I had high hopes for. I was envisioning something with some real salt/spicy flavor to punch of the dumplings. That sauce was, as far as I could tell, entirely tasteless. The entire dumpling experience lacked even salt…

The edamame dumplings in sauce were particularly not good. Once again I was really hopeful that the broth would be super flavorful to pair with the blandness of the dumplings. Incorrect. The broth had the flavor profile of water. Most unfortunate was the consistency of the smashed up edamame filling in the dumplings. Once again, even some salt would have helped these bad boys.

Then I ordered the scallion pancake with curry dipping sauce. That curry dipping sauce was the one standout sauce of this meal. It was DELICIOUS. Kind of heavy, but SUPER tasty. The scallion pancakes themselves were also pretty great. Extremely thing, delightfully crispy. Like a super thin crush New Haven pizza version of scallion pancake. The pancake was so good I ate most of it without the dipping sauce. Yes! It also had FLAVOR.

At that point I wanted to try one more thing and there were multiple main dishes with fish to choose from. So I asked my waiter (who was LOVELY - EXCELLENT service!) to weigh in and he suggested the Szechuan Grilled Mahi Mahi with mixed vegetables. I hadn’t had Mahi in quite a long while and that piece of Mahi was PERFECT. SEARED crispy on one side, cooked perfectly all the way through, served so piping hot I had to let it rest a bit before I could even eat it. The problem with this dish, again, was the sauce that the vegetables were covered in. Not good. Not spicy. Too gelatinous, which I always equate with jar sauces (i.e,. Not housemade). This dish would have been much better without the sauce…

There are clearly ways to eat at Rain and order items that are better/more tasty than most of my meal. Since the pancake and the piece of Mahi Mahi were so good I’m assuming there are other items on the menu that are similarly good. It’s too bad it’s so hard to figure out which menu items actually have the flavor.