Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: ENU

Little Shin Shin
4258 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, CA
http://www.littleshinshin.com/Dinner.php
Review date: January 2011

This restaurant inspired a spirited discussion between Carlos and I, the gist of which is at the end of this review. Not on how good it was (far from it, sadly) but why Chinese restaurants were so promising in the 1980's but then petered out into a long, painful decline that has culminated in places like this garnering a mind-boggling four stars out of five in Yelp. 

In fact, the only thing that keeps them from a five-star gold rating is that there are a lot of people like us, who are appalled and dismayed at what's being served to them. We yank the ratings down with one- and two-star reviews.

We don't have high hopes for any Chinese restaurant in the East Bay anyway, but this one trumpets its selection as being named the "Best Chinese Restaurant in the East Bay" for the last ten years straight in two small local alternative newspapers.

That's just....sad. 

Really, really sad.

It's a typical modest Chinese restaurant, but several degrees cleaner than most. When reading the menu, the one good sign is that the deluxe (pre fixe) dinners have steamed rice instead of fried rice. After that, however, the food sank to a level only slightly above Khanh Huong Chinese BBQ /Alameda or Holly's Mandarin just down the street (which was so bad I didn't even bother to write up a review a year ago). 

Since those two are places we have no intention of returning to, in the hopes of protecting not only our stomachs but our palates, we are indeed damning Shin-Shin with very faint praise.

The good:
•	It wasn't greasy.

The bad:
•	It wasn't salty enough, even for our reduced-sodium tastebuds (except for the sauce on the chicken wings, below).
•	Hot and Sour soup: It wasn't especially spicy or sour. One of the blandest renditions Carlos has ever had.
•	Szechuan Green Beans: al dente Kentucky Wonder beans (strike 1), a tasteless and very scant amount of ground pork (strike 2), and again, little heat (strike 3, and out!).
•	Stir-Fried Dry Bean Curd with Beef: Misnamed, this is pressed bean curd, not dried bean curd. It's surprising more places don't use this type of bean curd; I've always liked the texture of it and like all bean curd it rewards a good sauce – which, needless to say, it didn't get in this dish. The beef had no caramelization at all, and the vegetables consisted of sliced red bell pepper and celery. Big negatives on those two veggies – neither one belongs in Chinese cooking of any region. Again, it had little flavor, despite being a supposedly spicy dish.
•	Lollipop chicken wings: These drummettes are formed into the classic bar food 'lollipop' style, dipped in a cornstarch-heavy batter, and fried within an inch of their little lives. They're drizzled with the only tasty sauce of the meal, a sweet soy/garlic/Chinkiang black vinegar sauce (read about the latter at: http://chinesefood.about.com/cs/sauces/a/ricevinegar.htm). Despite the menu's claim, it had absolutely no heat to it. Carlos liked the chicken wings, I found them way overcooked and dry. 

In sum, we aren't inclined to rank Shin-Shin very high. It's watered-down Chinese food, and I can't imagine any chef being proud to claim it as his. Sadly, the customers don't seem to know the difference.  There's no passion coming from the kitchen, just indifference to tradition even though the quality of ingredients available today is so much better than it has ever been.  

Two people: Two starters, one veggie, one meat stir-fry, with tip was $49.

Follow-up: the gist of our discussion
At one time the future looked so promising for Bay Area Chinese restaurants. It's hard to believe and takes real effort to remember that period. Chinese is one of the world's three greatest cuisines, the product of centuries of wealth, talent, variety, and sophisticated taste. And just as French cuisine has been able to adapt and refine itself to the 21^st century, so should Chinese cuisine be able to do so. The fact that it's been done successfully elsewhere but faltered in the SF Bay Area is mind-boggling.

Bay Area Chinese restaurateurs had their renaissance in the mid-‘70’s and early ‘80’s when young Boomers and sophisticated WWII diners discovered a variety of ethnic cuisines they'd never seen before. The cooking was energized by large numbers of Chinese emigrating from Hong Kong to escape the Mainland Chinese takeover of the former British territory. They brought with them not only a wider variety of regional cooking but also a push for those ingredients that heretofore had been unavailable or too costly for anything but banquet cooking.

The 'chop suey palaces' began to disappear, and exotic regional Chinese 'greasy spoons' opened up like weeds after a rainstorm. The higher-end restaurants like Golden Pavilion and Imperial Palace widened their banquet offerings to include dishes they hadn't dared offer before.

For the first time there was an audience of non-Chinese who were eager for introductions to a variety of dishes that were unfamiliar: Hong Kong-style chow mein, Shanghainese dumplings, tea-smoked duck. Dried scallop soup, Squab Imperial, Chinese gai lan and gai choy. Beggar's Chicken, Eight Treasure Rice, hand-pulled noodles and Red-Cooked Beef. 

Sadly, those exciting discoveries never managed to create a solid base for further culinary discoveries. Restaurateurs who had run successful businesses for decades, eventually raised college-educated children who weren't interested in continuing the family business, with its long hours and small-business headaches. 

I have never really understood the fascination Japanese cuisine has for Western chefs. It's focused on appearances, a limited cuisine that quickly dead-ends, whereas Chinese cuisine has a much wider variety of techniques and so many more interesting flavors that would meld beautifully with Western sensibilities. 

Chinese food gradually fell back into the dreaded "cheap food" niche, cooking for the lowest common denominator. It has never found a chef who could gain national attention and promote a sense of excitement and creativity to blend with the rich traditions of Chinese cuisine. Instead we have the ridiculous antics of Martin Yan on one end and the imperious traditionalism of Cecilia Chiang (of the Mandarin restaurant in SF) on the other. Neither chef has ever tried to take Chinese food out of the wok and into the high-end fusion where it would so easily fit. Tommy Toy, former maitre d' at the Imperial Palace who owns the restaurant of his name, hasn't been able to move out of the Chinese banquet/tourist dinner niche despite three decades in SF.

So successive generations of Chinese restaurateurs – many of whom aren't Chinese these days – keep lowering the bar for customers looking for $15/person dinners, with no one to challenge or inspire them to be better, instead of merely adequate. 

We'll keep looking for something better than the bare-bones, MSG-laden Ly Luck in the nearby Fruitvale district. But we're getting discouraged, because we just don't see any indication that things are improving. In fact, it's pretty much the reverse: Chinese restaurant food is getting worse, and falling to ever-new lows. There's still some decent neighborhood places in San Francisco, but elsewhere – we haven't found any yet, if they exist.

At a time when bistro cooking is getting better and more diverse, the decline of Bay Area Chinese restaurant food is a real tragedy.