Chu Long Ji Restaurant brings a wide-ranging Chinese menu to a Wairau Valley dining room, with service split between lunch and dinner and the same kitchen available for pickup or delivery. The breadth is part of the appeal: a diner can stop at a bowl of noodles or build a long table meal from dumplings, cold starters, braised meats, vegetables and seafood. That makes the restaurant practical for both a focused lunch and a group keen to compare several dishes.
Dumplings give the menu much of its character. Steamed soup dumplings come in an original style and a sweeter Wuxi variation, while delicate wontons pair shrimp with shepherd's purse in a light broth. A red-oil version offers a warmer counterpoint, and the steamed selection extends to glutinous-rice shaomai, vegetable buns, squid-ink pork buns and shrimp dumplings wrapped in dark squid-ink dough.
Larger plates move between gentle braises and crisper, more assertive cooking. Salted duck and chicken scented with Shaoxing wine sit beside crisp pork shank, garlic pork chops and soy-braised pork hock. There is tofu with mince and chilli oil, chicken in green-pepper oil and fish cooked with pickled cabbage and chilli, giving a table plenty of contrast between rich, tangy, savoury and numbing-spiced flavours.
Familiar staples are readily covered by the noodle and rice sections, from scallion-oil noodles and a slow-stewed red broth to Yangzhou fried rice. The smaller dishes deserve equal attention: garlicky green beans, chilled bean jelly, cucumber with jellyfish, marinated bran dough with peanuts and black fungus, cold spinach and wasabi-soy okra all offer different temperatures and textures. Ordering across those sections turns the menu into a more varied sharing experience than a simple sequence of mains.
Address: Unit 11, 20 Link Drive, Wairau Valley, Auckland 0627, New Zealand
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