iChina Restaurant: Chinese Fine Dining in Santa Clara CA [Review]

One of my favourite meals from my Bay Area trip this past summer was at iChina.

This stunning fine dining restaurant and lounge is located in Santa Clara’s Westfield Valley Fair and focuses on innovative Chinese cuisine with high-quality, locally sourced ingredients.

China means “love China” – a name that reflects a passion for Chinese cuisine, heritage, and culture. The restaurant is also inspired by its location in the heart of Silicon Valley where innovation is prominently ingrained in the local culture.

Interior

The beautiful interior was inspired by China’s ancient imperial palaces and designed with an eye for grandeur.

The restaurant offers three distinct dining options for guests: the JiuBa cocktail lounge on the first floor perfect for pre-dinner cocktails; a full-service dining room on the second floor; and four exclusive private dining spaces including a unique virtual reality room.  

Menu

iChina’s menu features dishes inspired by all eight of China’s culinary regions with an emphasis on Cantonese, Sichuan, and Shandong cuisine. 

The culinary team behind iChina includes chefs with experience at Michelin-starred restaurants globally.

Their chef-driven menu pays homage to Chinese cuisine by preserving and enhancing the food’s inherent tastes with artful use of cooking techniques, spices, and flavor profiles.

Executive Chef Lam believes in serving only the freshest and in-season ingredients such as locally sourced produce from farming partners and the most-high grade meat and seafood from purveyors across the world.  Chef Lam’s utilizes these stellar ingredients in his new menu items inspired by both tradition and innovation. 

What We Tried

They had switched from a prix-fixe dinner menu only to having an a la carte dinner menu just a few weeks before we had visited. Here’s what we tried:

Golden Main Lobster Soup featuring Maine lobster tail, kabocha squash, and spiced puffed rice. The soup was slightly sweet and poured at tableside. The lobster was perfectly tender.

Pork & Cabbage Potstickers featuring Encino Farm Iberico pork, aromatic chili oil, and ginger brewed black vinegar pearls. The innovative part was how the vinegar was made into pearls rather than a dipping sauce.

Roast Duck Fried Rice with shredded roast duck, sliced duck breast, green beans, farm eggs scallions, and baby iceberg lettuce. Crispy roast duck skin with tender meat and perfect fried rice.

48-hour Hong Siu braised pork belly with soy braised heritage pork belly, morel mushrooms and pickled red onions. True to the flavours of this traditional Shanghainese dish with a melt-in-your-mouth tender pork belly.

Cauliflower side dish. Crispy and delicious!

Buddha’s delight with braised tofu with lotus root, shittake mushrooms, asparagus, cloud ear mushrooms, baby carrots and shimeji mushrooms. Delicious and composed of quality vegetables.

Overall Impression

Overall, I very much enjoyed the intricate plating, lavish and quality ingredients, and impeccable service.

Too bad for the low Google reviews for iChina because it seems that some people that gave low ratings might have expected the pricing level and portions of a casual, Chinese restaurant.

This is not the case for iChina where the quality of the ingredients are higher; there is creativity and care in preparing the dishes; and the flavours and cooking techniques shine without needing to use MSG (based on what I felt from the dishes).

The restaurant is also in a bit of a funny location – that is being in a mall as well as being near a food court where people would line up for more affordable places like Ramen Nagi. There could be a disconnect from the more higher end customers that they want to attract versus the mall clientele that would prefer a casual restaurant.

For a wonderful Chinese fine dining experience, I would recommend visiting iChina.

iCHiNA – 2855 Stevens Creek Blvd, Santa Clara, CA
www.ichinarestaurant.com

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