Today we ate at Lugang Café, a newly opened restaurant in SM City Davao Annex. Just in time for the Chinese New Year, I suppose. A little bit of Google searching told me that this is their 8th branch, following the seven branches located mostly in SM malls in Manila.

Before they showed up here in Davao, I have never heard of this chain before. The only reason I wanted to try this place out was their promotional ads before opening: a photo of their xiaolongbao that had the caption "xiaolongWOW". I don't think it's too difficult to outperform the only other place in this city that I've sampled the xiaolongbao of considering how utterly disappointing it was, but I was still quite skeptical. After all, my only other experience is Din Tai Fung, and they're a fancy pants Michelin star restaurant or something.

In any case, keeping your hopes low is a good strategy for avoiding heart crushing disappointments and increasing your chances to be pleasantly surprised. I highly recommend it.

As with any new place that just opened, Lugang Café had quite the waiting list. We had to wait a few hours to finally get seated, which wasn't so much a problem with me because I wasn't too hungry yet. I was just excited to eat xiaolongbao again!

Lugang Café serves Taiwanese cuisine. It's definitely very pricey for Davao standards so I think this is more of an occasional treat kinda thing, but it is worth it for the dimsum! My personal recommendation is that you go only for the dimsum. They're filling enough that you wouldn't need to order their rice or other items. They're not bad (I especially liked their salt and pepper squid), just that they do their dimsum a lot better.

I would apologize for the weird low quality photos, but I think even if I was using my DSLR instead of my phone camera I still wouldn't have been able to take better photos. I think it's obvious in my food posts that I'm not great at documenting my food for the bigger screen. Hopefully you're reading this on your phones and not your laptops!

Most of the time I just post food photos on my Instagram instead of writing about it, but I thought a pretty decent xiaolongbao should be written about instead of lazily sticking a few hashtags on it. While I wouldn't say it's "xiaolongWOW", it's definitely good enough that I'd wanna go back the next time I deserve a treat.