I stayed at the Shangri-La last month and had a great dinner at Canton Road with a couple of new…read morecolleagues. I think you can go pretty big here, but we just wanted some casual dim sum at the end of a long day. We were able to walk in and enjoy a relaxing, delicious meal.
The space was attractive and fancy, befitting a Shangri-La. Service was great, and we were fixed up with snack nuts, hot tea, and cold Tsingtao within minutes of sitting down. We ordered a bunch of dim sum, and it was all beautiful and tasty and easy to share.
We had a bunch of steamed dumplings, and I would recommend every one of them. The double flavor steamed xiao long bao with pork and crab meat were juicy soup dumplings, the crystal skin shrimp dumplings classic har gow fat with snappy, sweet shrimp. I loved both the classic siumai, steamed pork and shrimp dumplings with mud crab roe, and the scallop siumai, with steamed Iberico pork, shrimp, and US scallop dumplings with black garlic. There were four dumplings per order, a good serving size to share three ways.
From the baked and fried side, I enjoyed the baked pumpkin, black truffle and chicken puffs, which were a little sweet, a little savory, and adorably shaped like miniature pumpkins. The fried tiger prawn wontons were large and hard to eat but worth the effort--these sort of flaky, crispy purses filled with prawn meat and served with sweet and spicy chili sauce. We also shared the lovely pan-fried radish cake with XO sauce and got individual servings of the chef's daily soup, a soothing double boiled chicken soup that rounded out our dinner.
All this cost about $100 US, not bad at all for an excellent dim sum spread. I'd recommend Canton Road to anyone visiting Manila, whether or not you're staying at the Shangri-La.