Tina, a tall, gracious waitress at Shanghai Taste, is scrolling through fish photos on her phone. It’s my fault. I had asked her what species the kitchen uses to prepare its “salty crispy fish,” a plate of small, sinuous, head-on sea creatures that look like they were battered and fried while still gliding through brackish waters.
Internet photos are the common language between a diner and a server who don’t share the same mother tongue. Tina tells me the slender specimens are called “crystal fish,” but I later decide that’s a mistake based on a poor Internet translation. What I think she means is that they’re “silver fish” — not the pests that feast on our books, but tiny, translucent critters that can be eaten whole, head, cartilage, fins, everything. When encased in a cornstarch batter, the silver fish go down like crispy, immature mackerel, light and a little oily.
I keep knocking back these golden squiggles as if they’re French fries of the sea. And yet, “salty crispy fish” is not the dish that defines Shanghai Taste, a standard-issue outpost in Rockville’s Woodley Gardens shopping center. The dish that attracts diners is a bamboo steamer loaded with xiao long bao, those bundles of molten liquid better known as soup dumplings, or just XLB.
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