Shanghai Town

Reviews

• Brian G.

  star star star star star_border 30 May 2026

  Pretty decent shanghainese food right here in Davis! Previously I wasn't too impressed when I ordered the generic Chinese dishes but their Shanghai specials are actually solid!
  
  XLB soup dumplings: A-
  Taste is on point! You get 8 per order and it's definitely good, they just could use a little more soup in them.
  
  Lions head soup: A+
  Honestly blew away my expectations. Lions head is essentially a giant, tender meatball which tasted delicious. This dish also includes cabbage and flat clear noodle. Would come back just for this!
  
  Meat and vegetable rice clay pot: B
  Decent, but definitely not the strongest dish. The meat is actually salted pork belly sliced into small pieces and the vegetables is just cabbage. Slightly lacking in flavor as it's mostly just salt.
  
  Service here isn't great. Somewhat slow and the waitress only spoke Mandarin and I'm not confident in using my Chinese to order haha. It's family run though I think so I don't mind, keeps it feeling authentic.
  
  Food: 4/5
  Value: 4/5
  Service: 3/5
  Overall: 4/5

• Cynthia M.

  star star star star star 23 May 2026

  Came here after coming back from a snowboarding trip.
  
  Highlights:
  Rice Claypot: Crunchy rice on the bottom of the pot was SO GOOD.
  Fried Green beans with black bean sauce: DELICIOUS
  
  They didnt have any pea shouts!
  
  Would definitely come back if I am in the area

• Nico Z.

  star star star star star 9 May 2026

  Shanghai town is my go to restaurant!! Reasonable price point for AUTHENTIC CHINESE FOOD!!! I am Chinese (international student from China) and the food in Shanghai town never disappoints me. Now I left Davis and I miss this place...

• Emmeline W.

  star star star_border star_border star_border 6 May 2026

  Decent cooking but VERY questionable hygiene-- Much like many Chinese restaurants. lol. I've been here a few times and didn't have any issues, but this particular visit the other day convinced me to never come back again :-(
  
  This place is a lil janky. Not gonna lie. It's humid, so dining in is basically like sitting inside a sticky oven. The place was empty when I came in at noon on a weekend, but the staff didn't really clean anything from the tables or floor. At night there are usually crowds in here, so maybe... They didn't clean up from the previous night???? :|
  
  There was only one person at the counter. Between the worker struggling to understand and the audible giggling on the other end of the line, I can only deduce that the restaurant was dealing with a prank caller. I feel terrible that Chinese eateries likely have to deal w/ that type of nonsense all the time, but I was idly standing there for maybe 15 mins before I was attended to-- and by a DIFFERENT worker who came out from the kitchen, while the initial worker (the prankee, I suppose) finally hung up the phone and began rambling to someone in the back (?????). Afterwards, my order came out within 15 mins.
  
  SCRAMBLED EGG & TOMATO: The server was kind enough to advise me to keep the takeout box upright to prevent spilling, but if the dish is THAT watery, I feel like a plastic soup container with a lid might be more appropriate... I know that 番茄炒蛋 is runny sometimes, but this was just so much liquid it was essentially scrambled eggs in tomato-water. Yikes.
  
  The dish was alright, but after poking around, I found two things:
  1.) a random rice noodle chillin with the eggs. There's no noodle in this dish, so they're either cooking dishes too closely together, or they don't wash their cooking utensils between orders. N i c e (-:  Didn't irk me THAT much, but there weren't many orders going on at the moment (the place was dead) that could warrant the hurry that causes this kind of mistake.
  2.) A coarse, curled, black HAIR... Yo is this someone's pubes or WHAT????? I threw the whole thing away. I would've asked for a refund if I hadn't already walked blocks and blocks away. Since this happened so casually, I can't help but wonder what other health issues lay hiding...

• A B.

  star star_border star_border star_border star_border 6 May 2026

  There was a long, black scraggly hair in my dish as well as in my bowl of rice. Never coming back here again.