Shan Dong - Chinese, Oakland

328 20th St, Oakland CA 94607
(510) 839-2299
Parking: street parking
Hours: Closed Mondays, Sun – Thurs: 10am to 9:30pm, Fri – Sat: 10am to 10pm
http://sd.qmobo.com/index.php

Last Visited: July 3, 2004

Food: 3 stars
Service: 1 star
Atmosphere: 2 to 3 stars
Price: $ to $$

Shan Dong serves Mandarin style food. If you don’t know what that means, Mandarin/Shanghai style food usually has some hot and spicy dishes and typically includes handmade dumplings and noodles.

Shan Dong has a simple setup. There is a counter and open kitchen on the front left and the dining area is wide open with round tables in the center and rectangular tables on the side of the restaurant. There are short chairs with a lot of chrome and white everywhere. The floor is white linoleum and the chairs are chrome with yellow seats. You should not be coming here for atmosphere.

- Boiled Pork Dumplings with Leeks – Ten dumplings are filled with pork and leeks. The dumpling wrappers are hand made and not too thick. The dumplings are accompanied with a soy sauce vinaigrette dipping sauce that gives the dumplings nice flavor. $4.95

- Szechuan Noodles with Hand Made Noodles – For a dollar more than the prices listed in the menu, you can select hand made noodles. These noodles are much thicker and wider than regular machine made noodles. The noodles came topped with a sesame paste based sauce that contained black wood fungus (a literal translation – there may be another name for this), bamboo shoots, minced pork, and minced waterchestnuts. The server brings the bowl of noodles in front of you and tosses it for you. The flavor is good, though not what I expected. $5.95

So you may be wondering why the service is only 1 star. There was nothing wrong with the service in general, except that our whole experience was destroyed by one simple thing. We originally ordered the Special Shan Dong Dumplings. Being that it was our first time visiting the restaurant, we had no idea what Special Shan Dong Dumplings actually were. We only knew we would be getting ten dumplings and that it would take about ten minutes for the dumplings to arrive at our table according to our waiter. About seven minutes after ordering our food, dumplings arrived. The waitress (not our waiter) said something that was incomprehensible, and being that none of the other food had arrived, I assumed she might be saying ‘enjoy your meal’ or something to that effect. The dumplings contained pork and leeks and since we didn’t (and still don’t) know what Special Shan Dong dumplings are, we ate it. About four dumplings into the dish, the waiter came and said that these weren’t our dumplings. We responded that it was okay since we had already started eating. When I asked what the difference was between these and the ones we ordered, he stated that these were supposed to go to another table. So I didn’t get an answer. Service should be customer-oriented. He should have realized I was asking about ingredient differences. First they give us the wrong food, and then the waiter claimed that the incomprehensible phrase that the waitress had said was actually her asking us whether or not we had ordered pork and leek dumplings. Considering we didn’t give an answer, I just became frustrated. Not only that, but the owner came and took our dumplings away and then turned around and gave them back after the waiter said we were okay with them. This would have been okay if the owner had actually asked us if she could take them away, but instead, she just took them from our table. What a disaster.

Needless to say, the food quality though good is not worth going back for (at least for me) since that would remind me of this awful experience. And since the restaurant made the mistake, they should have charged us for the lower priced dumplings (Special Shan Dong) instead of the higher price for pork dumplings. Instead, they charged us for the pork dumplings, and considering the actual cost, it wasn’t worth the effort to even make this request for a correction. Shan Dong has decent food, but isn’t customer oriented – a big blemish in my eyes. I wouldn’t return.