Edwin Ng and a former partner at Jesse’s have taken over Casa Mia’s old space and given it an generic Asian look with stone grey accent walls, potted plants and umbrella-like white overhead lights. If they switched out the white banquet tables, it could be a Japanese restaurant.

You enter through a big, black door that whizzes open to show a restaurant with fully glass walls. There are views of the furious thoroughfare outside and curious neighbors from the residential building next door. It’s not a glamorous view, but it’s very China.

For appetizers, we had the traditional sliced lotus (RMB18), stuffed with glutinous rice and drizzled with maltose caramel, and drunken shrimp. The lotus is good, but they are the French fries of Shanghainese cuisine–hard to screw up. Our smaller-than-expected order of drunken shrimp (RMB32) came in an un-lively soy sauce-based marinade. The dish lacked complexity–there’s no slight sour from the vinegar and barely a trace of drunkenness.

For mains, we stuck to their specialties, the chicken with rice wine (RMB88) and the hongshao rou (RMB48). The chicken was a star. Sweet rice wine, ham and shiitake mushrooms lent their aromas to freshly butchered spring chicken. The meat was tender and its rice wine broth made a fine sauce for our house special fried rice (Yangzhou fried rice with soy sauce, RMB22). The hongshao rou however, turned out saccharine with the pieces of fatty pork lacking that enjoyable, meltingly soft consistency. We ended the night with bite-sized pieces of stinky tofu (RMB18) thrown back with beer. The bite-sized pieces didn’t have the usual stink (a good thing?) but the flavor was intact.

Full House is OK, but if it’s to compete with the city’s other great Shanghainese spots, it needs to step up its culinary game.

Our rating: 3/5

DETAILS

What: Full House

Where: 221 Shimen Er Lu 石门二路221号

Tel: 6209-1686

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