We tried Soga Shabu Shabu for an early dinner on Monday night. This was at their new location on the ground level on State Street. The location on State Street is easy to find and easy to get to. Although the restaurant has been open at this location for several months it still seemed like the space was under construction. Our waitress led us to an empty table and we perused the menus.
This is where it got confusing. There are two completely different menus. One is what I will call the American menu. It has the ubiquitous dishes found at any take-out Chinese restaurant. Cheap, filling, occasionally tasty but often bland. On their web-site they call it the All Day Menu. Then there is the multi-page 'authentic Chinese Menu'. Much more expensive but also more interesting. Offal, lamb, frog, clay-pot and specials. What makes it confusing is that some dishes appear to be on both menus but with different prices: ex: dumplings, sesame chicken, beef with broccoli. Some dishes such as Cumin Lamb were in the Chinese menu multiple times. It made me wonder what the difference was. I asked our waitress about the dumplings and she told me it was a typo but I still found it confusing as it indicated fewer dumplings at a higher price.
Regardless we ordered the dumplings, the cumin lamb and the eggplant in garlic sauce. The flavors and textures of everything we had were spot-on. The portion sizes were large enough we took some home. I do wish the prices in the Authentic Chinese Menu were more like the prices in the All Day Menu but I will definitely go back and try other items. I thought everything tasted great!