There's this restaurant along Neil Road selling Shanghai food. The name is Qun Zhong (群众), or in direct translation, crowd.

Let's look at the map to have an idea of it's location. This is rough sketch by me, looks hideous but bo pian, I dun dare use Streedirectory.com's pic...

[IMAGE: Map

As usual, the grey area represent roads. The yellow square at the bottom left hand corner is part of Maxwell market. I have not enuff space to draw in the whole market. The dark green box slightly on top of maxwell is the Fairfield Methodist church. The light green area are jus empty spaces. Somewhere to the bottom and right of the bottom right corner is the chinatown market. The purple box is the weird 5 road junction in front of maxwell market. The road on the left is neil road, and Qun Zhong is along there. I don't have the exact address, you just walk from the traffic road up and look at the shops and you'll find it easily enough.

This restaurant sells Shanghai food, though the bulk of it's customers are Japanese, and it gets pretty crowded during dinner, and there's almost always a crowd outside the restaurant waiting for their seats. And sometimes, you will have to share table with other patrons.

I went there with Shadow last night. We reached it just before the dinner crowd came and got our seat easily enough. We ordered the usual stuff, meat sauce noodles (扎酱面), dumplings (锅贴), Xiao Long Bao (小龙包) and sour hot soup (酸辣汤). The noodles is not bad, not ultra fantastic, but nice enough. I don't really like to drink sweet and sour soup, Shadow's the 1 who wanted it. She said it's not hot (in the chilli sense) enough. I had a taste, really not hot. I like the dumplings, think it's quite nice. Xiao Long Bao is not bad, compared to what I had in Sg, but then, I have not tried alotta XLB in Sg. I heard DTF is quite gd, but I never been there. Qun Zhong's XLB is certainly nowhere near to what I had in Shanghai, but it's good enough for now.

By now the crowd is starting to gather outside the restaurant, but we decide to order a couple of more dishes. Desserts. We ordered a bowl of tang yuan (汤圆) and red bean paste pancake (豆沙锅饼). The pancake is my favourite. Taste real nice and crispy. Tang yaun is not bad as well. Ir's served in osmanthus soup, fragrance and nice.

This meal cost us $36.10.