Here's some potentially great news for lovers of Chinese food: Fortune House, a new Shanghai-style restaurant, debuted in June in Las Colinas. It's exciting because the owner and chefs are from Shanghai -- via Vancouver, where you find some of the best Chinese cooking in North America -- and the menu is extremely promising.
Owner Lucy Yong says she missed her favorite "Shanghai flavor" dishes when she moved to North Texas from Vancouver, and dreamed of opening a restaurant featuring them. To that end, she has brought two chefs -- Ren Guoqing and Zou Guifeng -- from Vancouver to head the kitchen. According to Fortune House's website, Ren served as head chef Shanghai River Restaurant in Richmond (a Vancouver suburb). Zou is a pastry chef specializing in dumplings who worked at the Golden Great Wall, a Szechuan restaurant in Vancouver.
The dumpling selection looks pretty enticing, starting with crab meat steamed buns Shanghai-style. The menu features "steam juicy buns" (which Yong says are xio long bao, often referred to as soup dumplings), chicken and celery dumplings, cabbage and pork dumplings and more. (Dim sum service is not offered. "Dim sum is Hong Kong," explains Yong.)
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The "Shanghai flavor" portion of the menu also includes one of Yong's favorite dishes -- sauteed shrimp with duck egg yolk. There's also braised pork knuckle with Shanghai bok choy, braised jumbo meatballs with vegetable, Liang Xiang chestnut chicken in hot pot and much more. On the regular menu you'll find deep-fried marinated duck, another one of her favorite dishes.
Although North Texas has a significant and growing Chinese-born population, the Chinese cooking scene has been fairly static for the last five years or so. Hopefully the debut of Fortune House is a sign that this is changing. Other movement: the new chef who took over the kitchen at Royal China last year, Wei-Gou Ca, has reinvigorated the Kao family's 41-year-old North Dallas restaurant. Meanwhile, April Kao recently told The Morning News that her former noodle chef, Zhang Xue Liang, has plans to open his own restaurant.
Fortune House is open daily for lunch (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) and dinner (5 to 10 p.m.).
Fortune House, 8150 N. MacArthur Blvd., Irving; 972-831-9888; 972-831-9889
