Rice Valley Shanghai Bistro

Closed for business effective today.
The doors are locked and lights are off.
Sadly, this quaint restaurant never found its footing here. With a competing Shanghai eatery across the street offering larger portions and cheaper prices, they struggled in filling tables.
While picking up dinner last night, a waiter told me that the next restaurant will offer Vietnamese cuisine.
Will update when more information is available.

All the food here is lacking taste. The food came out way too fast meaning the temperature was warm or cold, not steamy hot. Customer service is not nice, the way they talked to me was very rough and «know it all». Tables and seats are dirty.
— Dim sum food: taste old, like it’s made yesterday and they just brought out left overs. Not enough flavor. It’s just not fresh and seemed store bought.
— Soup dumplings: small and everything was cold. Soup leaked out a lot just by picking it up, meaning it wasn’t wrapped well.
— shanghai style nian gao: no flavor, not enough soy sauce taste, tasteless!
Never coming back. Should be closed down.

The table is dirty, and they were using vacuum cleaner and make. Shouldn’t clean job has to be done before they open. I took long time to server food.

Finally found my Chinese takeout place after 3 years in my apartment! We ordered the sweet and sour chicken, mongolian beef & sweet and sour chicken. Everything was great! Super flavorful and fresh tasting, not too greasy like some other places. The mongolian beef was definitely on the spicy side-​but still super yummy. Portions were pretty solid as well, we at leftovers for 2 days! MMMMMM I can’t wait to order from them again!

Let me tell you… This place has the best Shanghai soup dumplings!!! You won’t be sorry! Great service and very friendly service!

I love this place. They might not be as busy as the one across the street, their food was yummy to me. I’d come here on Sundays when I don’t feel like cooking. I usually get the Shanghai rice noodle, a couple of their appetizers and a bowl of hot sweet soy milk. When they first opened, they had that deal of a free cup of latte. It was good.

Bummed to have to update with a bad review, but the beef and broccoli was bland, soggy and a mess (packaged poorly). The duck wraps were mediocre.
Estimated delivery time was 60min. An hour and a half after placing my order, I called and they said it would be here in 15 minutes. It’s 6 min. away by car.
No soy sauce, soggy napkins. Won’t be ordering from this place again.

My BF and i ordered food here once and ate in the restaurant once. We got very similar items but when we had it in the shop itself, it was a lot bigger in size and it was also tastier. We got the pan fried buns for 5 dollars, potstickers for 5 dollars, yang chow fried rice for 8.99 and general’s chicken. It was huge in portion. In addition, we ordered westlake beef soup. The food was tastier in store with more flavor. Great service, food came super fast. Plenty of left overs and we paid about 40 for all the dishes. Great bargain. Eat there instead of take out!

Been here many many times, buy one get one free xiao long bao, well that special is over…
NoWe had xiao long bao, which are pretty good…
Shanghai noodles, flavored well, in fact, the meat they use is pretty good, other places sometimes use meat that has a fridge taste, my pet peeve
Chives n shrimp dumplings were also quite good, nice big chunks of shrimp…
Even though they stopped the bogo, it is still overall worth the visit

I’m actually super surprised at the 3-​stars here, cuz whatever I had was super good. What do I know, though is that, since I’m Cantonese, and the cuisine is Shanghainese (hence different food regions), my measure of quality might not hit home with all due respect of others’.
They sat us down in a booth, and I very much welcomed this as a seque into a nice relaxing lunch. Service was prompt, and they were just getting to be slightly busy, so the growing crowd lent itself well to the positive buzz /​energy.
We went to town, and ordered —
Boiled Fish Fillet in Chili Sauce 13.99
Wasabi Shrimp 11.99
Wixi Style Pork Spareribs 10.99
Mapo Tofu 7.99
…and various dim sum dishes such as Chicken Feet, Beef Long Noodles, etc.
Hands down, the Boiled Fish Fillet in Chili Sauce was super good. The fish tasted flaky and fresh, was appropriately spicy, and served in a hot chili broth over a bed of bean sprouts.
My next favorite was the Wasabi Shrimp. It was lightly breaded and fried with a hint of wasabi.
The Wixi Style Pork Spareribs were pretty tender, but the sauce was just OK. The rest of the dishes that we ordered were good, but also fairly standard; actually none of the dishes were overly greasy or fatty, so it digested fairly well even after all that food.
It was kind of pricey, but I do think that their quality is better than the standard hole-​in-​the-​wall.

Wow this place is bad. Came here for my grandfathers birthday with the family. Would have never known about this place otherwise and I’m sad I know about it now because it is so whack.
Protip: if you have a table of 10 in your group, just tell them you have 12 or else they will put your party of 10 in this tiny table completely encased on three sides by a wall and you will have no room for your elbows and it will be impossible to use the bathroom if you are sitting inside. We tried to move to the next table but it was reserved for 12 people.
The honey walnut shrimp was one of the worst I’ve ever had. I actually had some earlier that day at a $ 9.99 buffet and it was 10x better than the ones they served here. All the food here tasted off and made me nauseous.
Entire family thought this place was bad, especially at $ 250. We could’ve eaten at Koi Palace for that amount. They also do not have a liquor license which we found out when we tried to order some beers for the table.
My family is Shanghainese and this restaurant is an embarrassment.

Saddest sticky rice rolls ever for $ 4. Served cut up into six pieces on a plate, it’s referred to as «sushi» in the menu. Filling is non-​existent except for the Chinese donut and a few hairs of pork floss.
Za Jiang noodles lacked flavor.
XLB skin is too thick and had hardly any soup.
The Shanghai style meat mooncake had a weird taste to it…
Salty soy milk was the only thing that was ok.
The menu is promising, since it offers various Shanghainese dishes that you don’t see at many other places, but execution totally disappoints.

Food is good here! Shanghai Dumplings are 2 for 1 and are tasty and soupy! Eaten in 3 times and enjoyed every dish each time. Some of the dishes I had were chicken and fish in hot chili oil (both delish), spicy tendons, Shanghai rice cakes, Dan Dan mein and Zha Jiang mein (like the Dan Dan mein better), hot and sour soup, turnip cake and more… all very flavorful. They also have limited dim sum dishes.
I don’t come here for their service.
Tonigt, the Mr and I were too lazy to go out so we decided to try their delivery via EAT24. We ordered the Shanghai Dumplings (bummed that we didn’t get the 2 for 1 deal), Sischuan fish filets and Singapore noodles. Food came about half an hour later (decent time) and everything was still warm. Dumplings were not steaming hot like when you eat in but they were still nice and warm. Came with a cute dual packet of chili oil and soy vinegar. Fish was tasty and has a good kick to it. Singapore noodles could use a little more curry but tasty nonetheless.
Not all their dishes are available on their delivery menu so definitely prefer to eat in. But hey, if you’re feeling a little lazy, go for the delivery. It’s free and you get 2 free cans of soda!

If it’s a Shanghai style restaurant I always tend to over order because I want at least, minimum, the dumplings (xiao long bao or as abbreviated by many XLB), the green onion pancakes, the sticky rice. sometimes they won’t have the sticky rice so I would sub in something else.
The dumplings or xiao long baos, is well made. The flavor isn’t omg good but for the price it’s pretty damn good, and there was still hot soup held inside.
The green onion pancakes look and tastes like they made it by hand, not heavy in salt or grease and def better than most in the city.
The sticky rice or something sushi they call it, is good, but nothing special. made with white rice. Decent.
Others had the greens and noodles, I didn’t taste but they loved it.
Normally I would order Shanghai style rice cake but this time I ordered mapo tofu, big mistake. That’s like ordering sushi in a Chinese restaurant but what can I say, had a moment of weakness. The mapo tofu sauce was really watery and tastes like it came from a package.
I’d come back again but I think I’m going to stick with the dumplings, pancakes and noodles from here on out.

05−21−15 11am
TL; DR: serves dim sum during lunch, service can be hard to get if there’s only one person working FOH, food was edible but mediocre.
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They serve dim sum by order (check off a paper for what you want) here during lunch as to other options from their dinner menu are readily available.
First impression:
Empty but I’ve been here occasionally when there were people eating lunch. Maybe I came too early.
WARNING: had a bad smell of what might be «sewage pipe» when I first walked in.
Service:
«Sit anywhere you like» «what kind of tea»
Charges:
Like many dim sum places, there is a tea charge
Ordering:
I had three items, one I truly wanted to try, the other one out of three was a mistake, and last one was to see how that item fairs.
I ordered:
Onion pancake: very crispy outer layer, oily interior. Flavor and how it should be. ⁴⁄₅
Streamed pork dumpling or Sui Mai: has the look that should be open top dumpling with a dumpling skin surround the sides and bottom with fish egg or roe on top. Consisting of pork, mushroom and roe with possible wheat flour. Flavor tasted not as fresh but wished it was more TRADITIONAL with pork and shrimp as filling instead of just pork. ³⁄₅
Shanghai wonton soup: was a mistake during ordering reading only the first word «Shanghai…» without reading the rest”…wonton soup.” The wontons had a shrimp and pork filling but it had more wrapping than the actual filling. It was like eating wonton skin wrapper instead of an actual wonton. WARNING: the wontons are all different sizes and proportions, kinda threw me off whiling eating. Had a good chicken broth to it along with seaweed, egg yolk stripes and tiny little dried shrimps which I never knew the name.
Other: sells frozen dumplings
Parking: can be hard to find street parking since some places are meter parking and some aren’t.

I normally get 蒜香骨 and 响油鳝糊 here, very delicious. If you dont know what they are, try show this review to your server! hahaha
Anyway, this place can be packed during dinner hours in the weekend, I feel like this is one of better Chinese restaurants in this area (Sunnyside/​Glen Park). There’s a safeway parking just next door, so if you can’t find parking on Monterey (which is pretty common) you can try park your car there, and buy something from safeway, or not. haha
Because I live close to this place, so I normally just order pickup and head home for a pleasant meal!
Oh, they have some frozen dumplings/​other stuff, I want to try some next time when I am there.

I LIKE… got the spicy lobster and zha jiang mian (noodles).
Definitely coming back to try their other stuff. Looks like their dim sum is pretty good too but I didn’t get a chance to try it

Prices are reasonable compared to Shanghai Dumpling King and food isn’t bad. I usually get the XLB, porridge with fish, and a few other dumplings. I would’ve given this place 4 stars, however, due to my most recent visit just this Monday, I have to knock out another star.
When my bf and I got here and no acknowledgement was made (this happens all the time) so we decided to just sit ourselves. They brought us our tea and menu and we ordered our usuals. Once we got our food we noticed something unusual. They usually serve their XLB in two bamboo containers, however, this time they only gave us one while other tables still had two. Granted the restaurant was packed and they seemed short staffed, they should know what they serve and literally ripped us off. The waiters and waitresses don’t speak English very well and since our Chinese was limited we couldn’t asked why or argue with them.
The thing that irks me about this place is the customer service. As mentioned before, when you step in the restaurant, they don’t acknowledge you. It’s like everyone in the restaurant will turn their head, but them. If you can get passed the poor customer service, this place isn’t that bad, but for me, I rather go back across the street to Shanghai Dumpling King.

I really wanted to like this place, especially since it was recommended by one of my aunties, but sadly… it fell short.
Granted it’s CNY and any Chinese restaurant you go to this time of the year, it’s packed. Hence, we made reservation days in advance for our party of 12 and even called them this afternoon to confirm. However, upon arrival… we were told no one made reservations under our last name or for a party of that size. Ummm… ok, I can understand if they keyed in their reservations into a computer or even wrote it down in a book but no, when you are writing reservations down on little pieces of scratch paper and apparently, «lost» ours… that’s not cool! Fine, whatevers… no point in arguing, they promised us the next big table.
An hour+ later, we finally sat down. +1 star for the waiter trying his best to accommodate us, he brought out chairs for my grandma and her sister to sit and even took our order first while they were cleaning the table.
Upon getting our table, we had one male server and one female server helping with the tables upstairs. Sorry, I don’t say this often, but the female server was a total B! Sooooo freaking rude, just literally threw bowls and spoons on our table after our order of soup was sitting at our table for over 10 mins, no ladle… no bowls… we were literally staring at it, watching it get cold. Forget about asking her to serve the soup to us, that was out of the question! When the male server saw us serving ourselves, he quickly came over and offered to help.
Food wise, it was mediocre at best. Nothing stood out as being spectacular but of course, the younger ones liked all the fried dishes — honey walnut prawns and fried grouper. Several dishes lacked salt, bland and tasteless, while others were cooked w/​waaay too much cooking rice wine which also made the dishes bitter. XLB were ok, but the crab roe XLB on the sizzling platter was not worth it at $ 11.99! For $ 2 more, you can get a whole lobster instead. I must say… that’s pretty attractive, even though each lobster is only slightly over a pound. Granted that they’re more specialize in Shanghainese dishes, but there was no «wok» flavors whatsoever.
Back to our male server, he was pretty much the saving grace as to why I’m not giving this place only 1 star. He really tried his best to compensate our dissatisfaction by offering us an extra dessert and offered to remake some of the dishes. That was a nice gesture and very much appreciated.
It’s a shame — this place have so much potential too, especially since it double ups as a bakery/​café as well.

I really wanted to like this place. but I just couldn’t. It’s Christmas Eve and my other Shanghai go to spot was closed, so my family settled for this place. We got the crab roe dumplings on a sizzling plate for about $ 12, not worth it. My dad was actually mad that I ordered it instead of the regular dumplings. My first dumpling wasn’t bad but my second dumpling had crab shell in it! Grossed me out, so I wouldn’t eat another. The Shanghai rice cakes weren’t that bad, but it was a little too salty. The Shanghai noodles were hard and the meat pieces were so dinky! The meat was thinner than the noodles. I didn’t like this dish at all.
Our male server was also rude. He was in the middle of starting to take our order and then he goes to another table without a word to us and after that table he went to another table before getting back to us. Not impressed. He also kept trying to get us to order the lobster noodles after we said no.
They also advertised that there’s a free latte with ordering a meal, that was not offered nor did I want to ask with this disappointing service. Someone wrote on Foursquare that they give you free cheesecake after your meal as well, that didn’t happen.