Rain Modern Chinese
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It's amazing how much better the food was then I remember. We walked in as a group of four and were quickly seated by a window. Hot tea came out before we even had a chance to ask for it, which was perfect for a cold November afternoon. We were able to get refills on the tea without issues. When we ordered two servings of wonton soup the server asked if we would like the soups split into four smaller bowls, which we did. The rice came as a single bowl at the center of the table. The dishes were very well seasoned and a good portion size. It was great to eat family style and taste everything. They're fountain that's at the entrance reflected off the windows as we were sitting so it actually looks like it was raining outside, which given the name, is a cool effect. Overall, it's an excellent spot to stop by.
I continue to go to Rain and always get the same amazing waiter. He knows what I like and I have a "usual" order now. Sometimes I keep him guessing but EVERYTHING is delicious. Can't go wrong. Hit it on a snow filled night and the view is spectacular.
I don't know when Rain Modern Chinese started serving brown rice as an option with its entrees, but this is good news to me. I only know of a handful of Asian restaurants that will do this. It's expensive for them but brown rice is a healthier option. It's been a while since I've reviewed Rain. We've been stopping in to catch part of the Giants games. There are some Giants fans on staff which makes it fun. The last time we stopped in, Big Blue won. Rain remains an attractive restaurant. The staff is friendly and attentive. In addition to the brown rice, I like their spicy vegetables. I had Sautéed String Beans with Minced Pork which I really enjoyed. I've also always liked their Shanghai Soup Dumplings. The recipe has changed over the years. The dumplings are now larger and a bit more doughy, but they're still great. My husband has a new favorite dish. It's the Fried Fresh Squid with Seasoned Salt and Pepper Specialty. It's an explosion of flavors including some sliced jalapeño pepper. We take leftovers home and the fried squid reheats great in the air fryer.
Looking for a tasty and affordable lunch option on Lark Street? Look no further than Rain Modern Chinese! I came here for the first time on a weekday afternoon, and the place was mostly empty. Their menu is extensive and includes many lunch options. Since it was my first time visiting, I wanted to judge them on one of my favorite and classic Chinese dishes - Chicken and Broccoli. It came with either egg drop or sweet and sour soup, as well as two spring rolls and your choice of fried, white, or brown rice for $15. I opted for the egg drop soup, which, unfortunately, I decided not to eat due to the consistency. It was gel like and just didn't appeal to me. Fortunately, the Chicken and Broccoli was delicious and was a great portion size. It was incredibly filling! The service was also great as the waiter was extremely attentive and friendly. I will definitely return to try more menu items for both lunch and dinner!
Great prices!! My go to uber eats always. My favorite is the soup dumplings and the half portions of noodles are enough for two meals.
We ate lunch here today, we have eaten here many many tines, food is Fabulous. Service is very good and quick. I had the honey walnut shrimp, just awsm. My wife had the General Tso's Chicken, its the best. We recommend and will definitely go back.
3 months ago
I ordered takeout so not sure about the inside ambience and facilities. Service was very fast but again I ordered takeout out so not sure about wait staff. The food was ok, but not particularly more special than my local place I love. The egg drop soup was yummy and smooth. I thought the shrimp and broccoli would be a little more spicy than what I received, but it still tasted great. read more
2 months ago
Excellent if you know what to order! It was hard to find on the menu but we tried to order what we thought was authentic and what we typically order at Canton restaurants. Our server spoke some Cantonese which was awesome. We ordered a Tofu Fish Soup, Sauteed Eggplants, Fried Salt Pepper Squid, Peking Pork Chops, and Fried Tofu with Shrimp. The soup was delicious - savory and hearty with the cilantro flavor really shining through. The egg plant was so flavorful which made me eat more rice than I should have. The squid was on the tough side, but only took a few more chews to get through which wasn't a huge deal. It was still great. I wish the cuts of pork in the Peking Pork Chop was a bit fattier but that's just my personal preference. I know people who prefer it lean. And lastly, I never seen a restaurant that provided such large shrimp paste on top of the tofu. It's how I think the proportions should be everywhere! The tofu was very crispy. Overall, I had such a great experience here and would recommend to anyone looking for Chinese food. I'd imagine the Chinese take out here is decent too. read more
1 month ago
It's amazing how much better the food was then I remember. We walked in as a group of four and were quickly seated by a window. Hot tea came out before we even had a chance to ask for it, which was perfect for a cold November afternoon. We were able to get refills on the tea without issues. When we ordered two servings of wonton soup the server asked if we would like the soups split into four smaller bowls, which we did. The rice came as a single bowl at the center of the table. The dishes were very well seasoned and a good portion size. It was great to eat family style and taste everything. They're fountain that's at the entrance reflected off the windows as we were sitting so it actually looks like it was raining outside, which given the name, is a cool effect. Overall, it's an excellent spot to stop by. read more
2 months ago
2 months ago
Very overpriced for the quality and amount of food. While I enjoyed the ambience and the service was fine, the food was disappointing. The eggplant was underseasoned, and the portion for the walnut shrimp was tiny for the price. The 2 pork belly bao appetizer was also very lackluster for $9. read more
10 months ago
I continue to go to Rain and always get the same amazing waiter. He knows what I like and I have a "usual" order now. Sometimes I keep him guessing but EVERYTHING is delicious. Can't go wrong. Hit it on a snow filled night and the view is spectacular. read more
5 months ago
7 months ago
I found metal in my noodles, had already eaten a couple bites so I hope I haven't eaten any small pieces of the wiring I didn't see. read more
4 months ago
2 years ago
I don't know when Rain Modern Chinese started serving brown rice as an option with its entrees, but this is good news to me. I only know of a handful of Asian restaurants that will do this. It's expensive for them but brown rice is a healthier option. It's been a while since I've reviewed Rain. We've been stopping in to catch part of the Giants games. There are some Giants fans on staff which makes it fun. The last time we stopped in, Big Blue won. Rain remains an attractive restaurant. The staff is friendly and attentive. In addition to the brown rice, I like their spicy vegetables. I had Sautéed String Beans with Minced Pork which I really enjoyed. I've also always liked their Shanghai Soup Dumplings. The recipe has changed over the years. The dumplings are now larger and a bit more doughy, but they're still great. My husband has a new favorite dish. It's the Fried Fresh Squid with Seasoned Salt and Pepper Specialty. It's an explosion of flavors including some sliced jalapeño pepper. We take leftovers home and the fried squid reheats great in the air fryer. read more
10 months ago
Looking for a tasty and affordable lunch option on Lark Street? Look no further than Rain Modern Chinese! I came here for the first time on a weekday afternoon, and the place was mostly empty. Their menu is extensive and includes many lunch options. Since it was my first time visiting, I wanted to judge them on one of my favorite and classic Chinese dishes - Chicken and Broccoli. It came with either egg drop or sweet and sour soup, as well as two spring rolls and your choice of fried, white, or brown rice for $15. I opted for the egg drop soup, which, unfortunately, I decided not to eat due to the consistency. It was gel like and just didn't appeal to me. Fortunately, the Chicken and Broccoli was delicious and was a great portion size. It was incredibly filling! The service was also great as the waiter was extremely attentive and friendly. I will definitely return to try more menu items for both lunch and dinner! read more
6 months ago
1 year ago
2 years ago
Great prices!! My go to uber eats always. My favorite is the soup dumplings and the half portions of noodles are enough for two meals. read more
7 months ago
3 years ago
We ate lunch here today, we have eaten here many many tines, food is Fabulous. Service is very good and quick. I had the honey walnut shrimp, just awsm. My wife had the General Tso's Chicken, its the best. We recommend and will definitely go back. read more
2 years ago
I have been to Rain Modern Chinese quite a few times. Unfortunately the best thing that I can say about it is that is is pretty widely inconsistent. I have had a few okay experiences and some bad ones. The bad ones consist of shamefully overcooked meat, to the point that it crunches in your mouth rather than being able to actually chew it and specialty sauces that I am positive come from a jar! DO NOT ORDER THE PINEAPPLE LYCHEE DUCK! Or order at your own risk. The dumplings are typically good but I can't imagine they are house made. The service is generally okay. The best experience was the one I had most recently with a group of friends. Simon was our waiter and took the greatest of care of our table. He treated us like friends rather than customers. Overall I still prefer the quality of the food at Ala Shanghai Chinese Restaurant in Latham. The food is always good! You can tell because it's always slammed! Plus it has its own generous and safe parking lot. Rain is in a super sketchy area of Downtown Albany, though the restaurant is nice once you're safely inside. read more
1 year ago
9 months ago
1 year ago
3 years ago
The service at this restaurant was what would keep me coming back, if I lived in Albany. My daughter and I were here this week while visiting some national historic sites in the area. We had the soup dumplings which were some of the best I've ever had, they were huge and piping hot and delicious. My favorite part about them is that they were served to us by Rain's great staff! Our server was attentive, the food came out quickly and we also got delicious tea served in a tea pot! I cannot complain about the service at all. The string beans with minced pork was also very tasty. The Shanghai noodles were just so so and so was the wonton soup which is why I couldn't give a five star. I definitely recommend and I will be back to try the crispy beef cause that looked phenomenal read more
3 years ago
Excellent service. The waiter was very nice and took time to explain us about the dishes. We were a group of seven, and we ordered seafood fried rice, shrimp fried rice, Hunan shrimp, Singapore noodles, mahi mahi fish, and salmon. Every single dishes were amazing!! Would highly recommend read more
2 years ago
If you're looking for a cutting edge NYC Chinese style cuisine Rain is the place! The service and atmosphere go hand in hand with the quality of the food coming out of the kitchen. Rain is a place you go and relax and enjoy the full experience of what dining should be. This review could not be complete without mentioning how clean this restaurant is from the front to the back! read more
2 years ago
2 years ago
4 years ago
From the outside looking in, Rain Modern Chinese was calling out to us...we're happy to have answered the call! The restaurant was fairly empty on a Sunday night. The dining room is comfortable and quiet with nice music playing subtly in the background and a nice view of Lark St through the large front windows. Our server greeted us with hot tea and offered assistance as we looked through the menu. We chose fried dumplings and crab rangoon for our appetizers. They are both good, standard choices for comparing amongst restaurants. We went ahead and ordered our main dishes of Sizzling Black Pepper Strip Steak and Spicy Crispy Chicken. I asked how spicy the chicken was and our server's response was 'not too spicy as you can pick around the peppers.' Being daring, I went ahead and ordered the dish. All of the food was incredibly delicious. We surmised that both appetizers are made in-house. The wontons on the crab rangoon were the lightest and most crispy I've ever had. The dumplings were stuffed full with a tasty pork filling and were seared to almost being caramelized on one side. The only shortcoming would have been the sauce for the dumplings which was a bit thin and lacked the usual garlic-ginger zing that we're accustomed to. The steak dish was overflowing with fresh, crisp vegetables and the tender steak was cooked perfectly. The chicken had a kick! But it was great as the breading appeared to be made with rice flour giving it the lightest coating possible. The chicken, too, was tender beyond belief. Both dishes were piled high with food - enough to serve two. Unlike many other restaurants we've tried, neither the beef nor the chicken had any fat or grizzle. If you want some quality food in a comfortable, relaxing environment, give Rain Modern Chinese a try. You won't be sorry! read more
One of the better Chinese restaurants in the area. Good service, quality food and nice atmosphere. The pan fried wontons are some of my favorite. Sometimes I just have to hop on my motorcycle and cruise down to get an order or two of the Krispy and delicious pork filled wontons that have been fried crispy. Just thinking about it I am drooling on my shirt and my coworkers are wondering why. He will not be disappointed if you come here for a good Chinese meal. read more
3 years ago
Visiting Albany, found this gem. Food was excellent. Service was so so but, would definitely go back. Highly recommended. read more
5 years ago
Rain was okay. Not stellar, definitely not bad, but perfectly okay. It was a fairly clean establishment with relaxing music playing and some nice floor to ceiling windows. They automatically bring tea to you, which is excellent. The tea was hot and tasty. The server came fairly quickly, which was nice, and took my order of steamed dumplings and pineapple chicken. The dumplings were large. Very large. This was great, however they didn't have much sauce with them for dipping. While they were tasty, they were a little on the cooler side. Not cold, by any means, but let's just say I didn't have to wait a single second to eat them once they were put down. The pineapple chicken, well, that was something. I thought I was making a healthier option, with the photo on the menu showing grilled chicken with pineapples and peppers in a light sauce, but man was I wrong. The plate came served in a carved out half pineapple, filled with peppers, pineapple chunks, sliced chicken, mushrooms, and baby corn, absolutely smothered in your standard sweet and sour sauce. While it wasn't awful, it also wasn't stellar, and it was incredibly sweet, a far cry from what I was expecting (based on the menu photo). All in all it wasn't bad. Wasn't great, but not bad. I probably won't return, but I definitely can't say that for certain. Like Rain, my opinion is just, simply, okay. read more
3 years ago
The soup dumplings are to die for, the edamame app is amazing and the beef lo mein is so flavorful and delicious this is a great date night spot but also good for big parties I will always recommend this place for some good Asian cuisine! read more
4 years ago
Rain Modern Chinese Cuisine has been on my list for a while now and I finally made it there yesterday: a GORGEOUS, warm, sunny September day. Rain is right in the middle of the Lark Street neighborhood, which is really a fabulous area of Albany. Great neighborhood. Great vibes. So many places to eat/shop/etc. First: Rain is a beautiful restaurant. The bar, the dining room, the entrance up the stairs from Lark Street with the glass wall of water. Really lovely. The dining room is a corner with windows around both walls looking out onto the street. I sat at the bar which is big, roomy, very nice comfortable seats. There was a TV. I do like to have a TV at the bar when I'm on one of my epic lunch outings. My approach to eating out is to try as many different things as possible. Especially when I am trying a place for the first time. Rain was kind of perfect for that because they have a pretty extensive small plates section. I don't eat beef, pork or poultry and there were plenty of choices for me without those. I started with steamed shrimp dumplings and edamame dumplings in broth and fried jumbo shrimp with honey walnuts. And here's where we ran into trouble. The two main "issues" with the food I had at Rain were lack of flavor and really not great sauces. There are two things in American Chinese cuisine that make or break the dishes: fresh ingredients and REALLY GOOD sauces. The sauces I had at Rain were not good. At all. The first sauce I encountered was on the fried jumbo shrimp with honey walnut. Now the fried jumbo shrimp were PERFECTION. Hot, crispy, perfectly fried with just the right amount of breading. Each was tapped with one excellent walnut. The problem with the dish was the sauce, which was clearly the "honey" part of the dish and had the thickness and sweetness of the icing you'd get on top of a cinnamon bun. Yikes. WAY too much. ON a variety of levels. The steamed shrimp dumplings had great texture and filling and were each sitting in a little bit of sauce that I had high hopes for. I was envisioning something with some real salt/spicy flavor to punch of the dumplings. That sauce was, as far as I could tell, entirely tasteless. The entire dumpling experience lacked even salt... The edamame dumplings in sauce were particularly not good. Once again I was really hopeful that the broth would be super flavorful to pair with the blandness of the dumplings. Incorrect. The broth had the flavor profile of water. Most unfortunate was the consistency of the smashed up edamame filling in the dumplings. Once again, even some salt would have helped these bad boys. Then I ordered the scallion pancake with curry dipping sauce. That curry dipping sauce was the one standout sauce of this meal. It was DELICIOUS. Kind of heavy, but SUPER tasty. The scallion pancakes themselves were also pretty great. Extremely thing, delightfully crispy. Like a super thin crush New Haven pizza version of scallion pancake. The pancake was so good I ate most of it without the dipping sauce. Yes! It also had FLAVOR. At that point I wanted to try one more thing and there were multiple main dishes with fish to choose from. So I asked my waiter (who was LOVELY - EXCELLENT service!) to weigh in and he suggested the Szechuan Grilled Mahi Mahi with mixed vegetables. I hadn't had Mahi in quite a long while and that piece of Mahi was PERFECT. SEARED crispy on one side, cooked perfectly all the way through, served so piping hot I had to let it rest a bit before I could even eat it. The problem with this dish, again, was the sauce that the vegetables were covered in. Not good. Not spicy. Too gelatinous, which I always equate with jar sauces (i.e,. Not housemade). This dish would have been much better without the sauce... There are clearly ways to eat at Rain and order items that are better/more tasty than most of my meal. Since the pancake and the piece of Mahi Mahi were so good I'm assuming there are other items on the menu that are similarly good. It's too bad it's so hard to figure out which menu items actually have the flavor. read more
5 years ago
Super friendly staff. I get the same thing every time I'm pretty sure they know me at this point. The roast Duck noodle soup never fails me. The shrimp dumpling was different but I liked it. Affordable AF. Enjoy a cute place to take a date. read more
2 years ago
2 years ago
6 years ago
Rain is one of my ol' reliables, there for me in my times of trial and woe. The quality of the food can be variable: I had a stewed lamb dish there once off of a special menu insert that was so good that I still occasionally think about it, but I've also gotten some stuff that was disappointingly bland. The food is never BAD though, and the interior is nice, and the service is consistently sweet and attentive. It's the kind of restaurant that will never break your heart, and I appreciate that. Last night I was trying to fight off an awful headache that I couldn't shake, so I decided to order some roast duck noodle soup in the hopes that it would cure me. The in-house delivery guy called to let me know that he had arrived by cheerfully trilling, "dinner is here!!" at me, which was both hilarious and pretty in tune with how consistently nice everyone who works at Rain seems to be. The amount of (very tender and flavorful) duck they gave me bordered on the comically generous, like they'd chopped up half of a duck and tossed it into a to-go container for twelve bucks (what you can see in the pic is about a quarter of what they gave me). The broth and noodles struck me as pretty standard for cheap Cantonese-style noodle soup: they weren't lovingly simmering bones for 16 hours to make this, but if what you're looking fit is something hot, salty and soothing to cure your headache, hangover or existential crisis, you could definitely do worse. The spring rolls I ordered to meet the delivery minimum exceeded expectations and arrived very hot and perfectly crispy. The whole meal made me really miss sitting by the windows in their dining room for dim sum weekend brunch and watching the Lark Street action go by outside. As soon as indoor dining feels safe again it's going to be one of the first places you'll find me. read more
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More info about Rain Modern Chinese
259 Lark St
Albany, NY 12210
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(518) 729-4827
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http://rainalbany.com
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Ask the Community - Rain Modern Chinese
Can someone tell me the secret password to get the dim sum menu at this place? I can only find it on allmenus.com. it's not offered on GrubHub and they said they didn't have a separate menu when I asked at the restaurant.
I haven't had their dim sum nor did I know about it but typically, dim sum is served in the morning/early afternoon on weekends.
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