Yang's Fry Dumplings @ Reel, Shanghai

If you go to Shanghai and don't eat at least once at Yang's, it's like you were never there!

Yang's Fry Dumplings or 小杨生煎 is a chain of super-cheap dumplings and soups that you can find all over Shanghai. We visited the one inside Reel Shopping Center in JingAn (Metro stop JingAn Temple, lines 2 & 7).

It is located in the undergroud level of the Center, in a really nice Food Court where there are many other food options: sushi, hotpot, Stabucks, McDonalds, noodles, fries, etc. Btw, memorize the ideograms 小杨生煎 because there's no English sign, however you'll recognize it from the yellow dishes and the lines.

We ordered the soup with pork which is just a bowl full of boiling broth, some slices of pork and coriander. It's nice (especially on cold days), but nothing special.

The pork fried soup dumplings ( 生煎包 shengjianbao) on the other hand were very good. Since they are filled with soup, there's a tecnique to eat them: first you open a small hole on the top, then you put them near your mouth (using the spoon) and slurp the broth out of them, but be careful because the broth is boiling and you may burn your mouth. After you have sucked all the broth you can eat your dumpling normally. Do it like this or you'll get a "nice" explosion of boiling broth on you... not pleasant.

4 dumplings cost 6 RMB, less than 1 euro, the soup is 8 RMB. Although the menu here is simple, there are pictures you can point at to order.
Surely the cheapest meal we've had, the dumplings are great, perhaps if they weren't so boiling hot they would be excellent. The location at Reel mall is super conveninent if you're staying in the area, especially because you can sit down and enjoy your dumplings, not like in many other branches where you eat standing up. It's also nice to walk around the food court to see the different food options (sushi, macarons, cakes, etc.) - the mall upstairs however was empty, lots of super expensive stores but almost no people around.

Yang's Fry Dumplings @ Reel Kitchen
小杨生煎
1601 Nanjing West Rd - Level B2, Jing'an, Shanghai

Chinese address: 南京西路1601号