It's been a year and a half since we moved to East Bay. We found that its Asian population is growing and is discovering Chinese communities in East Bay. The Union City mall has Asian food products, Japanese one dollar stores and a Chinese / Vietnamese / Thai restaurant called Marina Mall. Our general contractor, who repaired our house immediately after we bought it, told us about a restaurant that served home northeastern Chinese cuisine. The name of the restaurant is “Little Shen Yang”. Since the shopping center is located near the college, many students and young people seem to have lunch at this restaurant.
There are two entrances in the mall, one from Alvarado-Nil street and the other from Dekoto street. The restaurant is located in the deepest part of the shopping center. Since she was from Anshan-shi, which is close to Shen Yang, mainland China, my wife was very interested in Little Shen-Yang. There were two northeastern Chinese-style restaurants on the peninsula, and we tried them, but everyone was bad: either my wife didn’t like the restaurant, because it served common, not authentic Chinese cuisine, or we found that the restaurant was for too much competition.
One weekend, my wife and I first went to Little Shen-Yang. This is a small restaurant with a minimalist decor in the dining room. We noticed from the outside that the menu items were written on colored paper and hung on each wall. Although I could not understand exactly who they were, since they were all written in Chinese, the additional menus excited my wife.
I decided to leave all options to my wife, since I had no idea what additional menu items were. She ordered three dishes. The first was a fried Chinese-style cake made from semi wheat. The second is sour sour cabbage soup with meatballs. The third consulted chopped beef with green onions. Later she additionally ordered a sweet and sour fish and roast pork, Japanese Tempura style.
The cake is lightly salted and freshly baked. We finished the first round in about 10 minutes and finished the order of the next dish. The cabbage soup with meatballs was what made my wife jump up and down in the restaurant, as she liked very much. She told me that for the first time she tried a real Northeastern soup since she left China. A dish of shredded beef with green onions was what I liked the most, and would highly recommend. Sweet Chinese sauce was similar to Teriyaki sauce, and tender shredded beef was excellent. Pork tempura was crispy and fresh. It was better than similar food served in any Japanese restaurant.
Since we ordered a lot more food than we could eat in a restaurant, we took home about half the food. When we overheated the food at lunchtime, we found that it was as good and fresh as the restaurant. We have never experienced the taste of a takeaway food as good as this one. We still go to this restaurant at least once a week, if not more often.
