This hybrid doesn't work. I had heard some mixed reviews, but enough good to venture out yesterday to try a Chinese Restaurant with a Japanese twist. The staff was friendly, but the food just didn't measure up. Having some errands in San Rafael, I thought it good timing to drop in for lunch. Yu Shang has a lunch menu that has quite a few Chinese dishes, plus sushi and some bento boxes.

I tried the Mixed Vegetable Special, which came with 'soup of the day' which was hot and sour soup. It was terrible, so I only took a couple spoonfuls. Lukewarm to cold, it tasted like egg drop soup with a lot of soy sauce and some vinegar thrown in. The waiter noticed that I barely touched it and offered me in a nice gesture, to bring me some miso, but I declined, knowing I would have enough food anyway.

Then my Mixed Vegetable Special came. The waiter forgot to ask my choice, according to the menu, of either fried rice or chow mein. It came with a default of fried rice. The rice was a disappointing mix of rice and egg so finely minced that it appeared like spots of lemon peel on the otherwise white rice. No veggies or meat/seafood to flavor it. The 'appetizer of the day' was strips of fried won ton skins with sweet & sour sauce drizzled over -- yuck. Now that is cheap. The mixed vegetables themselves however tasted quite nice, and had just the right amount of crunch.

Next misstep was that the appetizer arrived after the main dish. I decided to try the Three Stooges which was supposed to be a a roll with snow crab, scallops and tuna. The tuna graced the outside, and was fresh and pretty. In fact, it was all I ate of the dish after then first, then second confirming surprising bite. First, I could not distinguish any scallop in the dish, either by taste or viewing. The snow crab was a smoked crab salad from the best I could distinguish. Did not taste fresh, yet it was hard to distinguish because of the smoky flavor. The shaved cabbage had some kind of clearish gelatinous dressing on it, that tasted of mayonnaise although it didn't have its appearance at all. As I mentioned, after trying hard to distinguish the flavors, I gave up on the whole thing other than the fresh tuna topping after the first two trial bites.