Rain Modern Chinese — Restaurant in City of Albany

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...

Food is passable and way too expensive for the quality, taste, and amount of food you get. I was given rave reviews by several people who had not been there since covid, so I decided to try it. I can get better chinese food at those china fast food restaurants for half the price. It was around 11:30 when I got there and there was absolutely no one there in the restaurant. I should have taken that to heart - high prices bad food.

Lets start with the menu, I went to THEIR online menu, and looked at the prices, but only ordered when I got there. The prices online are 1 to 4 dollars cheaper across the board then it was in the restaurant . My $10.5 entree on their online menu was 13.00 there, my large wonton soup online listed $7 cost me $9, my eggrolls listed online for $5 was $6 there. Hey managers at Rain, if you are charging more at the restaurant then CHANGE YOUR MENU ONLINE to reflect the correct prices.

Now lets talk about the taste. Eggrolls - the dough (I think it was rice dough) was so thick that you only tasted the dough. The filling (what little there was in it) had a good taste if you didn't eat the fried dough wrapped around it. Also for $6 I expected larger rolls. - NOT WORTH THE PRICE - both taste wise and money wise

Wonton Soup - Flavor of the soup was OK - I can make tastier and I don't like to cook. The wontons were pathetic. The dough they were made of absorbed the liquid so fast that by the time I got home and we started to eat, the dough was falling apart and very soggy. Reminded me of very over cooked pasta. It was horrible. The port meat rolled inside were fairly large and tasty, but hard to cut for some reason. Again NOT WORTH THE PRICE (even if price was online price of $7 instead of the $9, I paid for it.

Chicken with broccoli entree - What can I say expect that I was really disappointed it in. The pork fried rice had little flavor in it, the broccoli was cook OK, but flavor wise again flavor was almost non existent. The eggroll that came with it again was too doughy and you couldn't taste the filling.

Maybe I went on a bad day, but I honestly can say that nothing I ate was great or even good enough for what I paid.. I will never go there again. If I need chinese food, I go to one of the fast...

From the outside looking in, Rain Modern Chinese was calling out to us...we're happy to have answered the call!

The restaurant was fairly empty on a Sunday night. The dining room is comfortable and quiet with nice music playing subtly in the background and a nice view of Lark St through the large front windows.

Our server greeted us with hot tea and offered assistance as we looked through the menu. We chose fried dumplings and crab rangoon for our appetizers. They are both good, standard choices for comparing amongst restaurants. We went ahead and ordered our main dishes of Sizzling Black Pepper Strip Steak and Spicy Crispy Chicken. I asked how spicy the chicken was and our server's response was 'not too spicy as you can pick around the peppers.' Being daring, I went ahead and ordered the dish.

All of the food was incredibly delicious. We surmised that both appetizers are made in-house. The wontons on the crab rangoon were the lightest and most crispy I've ever had. The dumplings were stuffed full with a tasty pork filling and were seared to almost being caramelized on one side. The only shortcoming would have been the sauce for the dumplings which was a bit thin and lacked the usual garlic-ginger zing that we're accustomed to.

The steak dish was overflowing with fresh, crisp vegetables and the tender steak was cooked perfectly. The chicken had a kick! But it was great as the breading appeared to be made with rice flour giving it the lightest coating possible. The chicken, too, was tender beyond belief. Both dishes were piled high with food - enough to serve two. Unlike many other restaurants we've tried, neither the beef nor the chicken had any fat or grizzle.

If you want some quality food in a comfortable, relaxing environment, give Rain Modern Chinese a try. You...