Shanghai foodie report 1 - Dining at the high end - May 2013

 

Three on the Bund

Try to sum up the food scene of any city in a few hundred words and you’ll struggle. Try and do it to one containing over 23 million hungry people in its metropolitan clutches and you’re on a hiding to nothing. I might as well give up now.

Shanghai isn’t a city for sightseers. It’s a city for shoppers, and above all eaters. From the rarefied (if a little smoggy) air of the Bund and the towers of Pudong down to the lanes and shopping centres and street kerbs you can’t go anywhere without being assailed by the sights, tastes and smells of a million and one altars to the god of this secular country.

After several weeks attempting to eat my way around the place, I thought it wise to cover off a few highlights by price point rather than hitting everything I’ve experienced. I’ve updated a Google map for the city below that will contain the best of the rest as well as the recommendations I got but couldn’t find time for.

View Shanghai! in a larger map

Shanghai fine dining
Long, long gone are the days of the colonial caste that inhabited the Shanghai Club (the archaic membership ‘ran’ the city were so set in their hierarchical ordered ways that as the town fell to the Japanese in 1942, a visiting British naval officer wasn’t allowed in until a committee had been convened to vote him a temporary membership, despite the bullets peppering the building). It’s here, under the glare of the Pudong skyline, that the great, the good and the wealthy are still congregating.

Occupied still by banking and commerce, the Bund also features a plethora of high-end restaurants to match any city in the world. Three on the Bund, the only privately owned real estate on the strip, is an elegant building, the restaurants on its different floors carefully curated by superchef Jean Georges Vonerichen, the Alscace's answer to Gordon Ramsay. Unusual in that it doesn't feature rooms, in every other respect it has the impression of a very successful five star hotel.
 

Chocolate Budino at Mercato

You could stay in Shanghai for a week and only eat at Three on the Bund, such are the range of different restaurants within the different floors. We had a particularly standout meal at new Italian Mercato. It’s odd not to be eating with chopsticks, but once over that, there’s a lot to love here. A focus on locally sourced ingredients gave us amazing (in all senses of the word given the Chinese lack of dairy empathy) burratta, cut with a divine lemon compote. We followed that with Kingfish carpaccio and crispy skinned chicken to die for. The building also hosts the iconic Jean Georges, masculine Argentine steakhouse Colagreco and casual bar dining at Unico.

Also very much of note on the Bund are beautifully presented French classics ‘with a twist’ from Mr. & Mrs. Bund (their foie gras mousse is all manner of right), haute Middle Eastern at nearby M on the Bund and who knows what at the hilariously bonkers sounding Ultraviolet, an ‘immersive’ food experience where what you see and hear are given as much respect as what you eat. Like Heston Blumenthal on no sleep and an enormous bag of mind altering drugs. 

 

The dining room at Table No1 

 Other than those few, if it’s non Chinese you’re looking for, you’ll find a wealth of European and American comfort food (including the obligatory Morton’s Steakhouse) among the gleaming towers of Pudong and the usual swathe of Western friendly tastes in most of the higher rated hotels. You’ll also find Ramsay alumni and chef du jour Jason Atherton occasionally skulking behind the pass at Table No1 in beautifully Brooklyn inspired boutique hotel Waterhouse at South Bund. Visit for casual dining and the modern interpretations he’s known for in London (including Pollen Street's deconstructed English Breakfast). I loved a delicate sole dish with light aromatics and gently steamed veg. It’s also, perhaps unsurprisingly, offers another English breakfast in the morning and possibly the only ‘proper’ herby English sausages you’ll find in Shanghai. Heaven for the slightly homesick on a Sunday morning!

‘Fine’ Chinese dining is somewhat harder to track down. The Whampoa Club also at Three on the Bund serves an elegant mixture of Chinese Imperial dishes and Shanghainese classics in a beautiful art deco jewelbox, We Jing Ge at the Bund Waldorf Astoria and the Family Li Imperial Cuisine off the same boulevard also offer a la carte and ‘grand dining’ set menu recipes ‘borrowed’ from the Forbidden City. Siblings Fu 1088 and Fu 1039 also deserve a mention, the pair serving traditional and high end Shanghainese (think sweet, sauce covered and fish focused) in large elegant Latinate villas near to Jing’an Temple. They are made up of a succession of private rooms and large tables so ideal for group and family dining, the preferred Chinese way.

 

Many, Many Mao

In general though, the Shanghainese don’t seem to have quite the same desire to spend big on home style foods, preferring (and I’m in absolute concurrence) to eat good at one of the many smaller provincial restaurants dotted around the city. There’s something bewildering but utterly pleasing about seeing a Porsche parked up on a non descript side road, is owner parked on a plastic stool outside a tiny hole in the wall serving the best damn take your pick in Shanghai. Now that’s cultured capitalism… I’ll cover some of those off in the next piece. 

China 2013 - It begins... March 2013

It starts here! Six weeks of travelling China, starting in Shanghai. I'm planning on experiencing (and eating) as much of it as I can in the time I have.

Like almost any international city these days, it doesn't have to be a challenge. You can safely closet yourself in one of the five star fun palaces on the Bund, foraying out only to the Disneyfied, repainted lanes of Xintandi and Old Shanghai, eating sanitised (if occasionally stunning) colonially influenced food from big name chefs in other hotels. You totally miss the point if you do.

I'm lucky enough to have a man (fellow food obsessive Dr Science) on the ground, I've been able to jump right in. Hopefully, two weeks here in Shanghai, including a week of intensive Mandarin lessons, will give me a decent jumping off point. I won't bother trying to rehash the historical context, unless it's really relevant, instead I'll assume you have access to Wikipedia or Lonely Planet. If I find better, I'll let you know.

There's a few museums, but as much as anything, Shanghai is food, shopping and food. Pause for a drink and then grab some more food. Fine. By. Me. If New York is represented as the Big Apple, then Shanghai to the newbie is a plate of chilli covered Fish Maw; spicy, boney, resolutely and viscerally real, uncompromisingly challenging the first time you approach and yet utterly addictive with nuggets of absurdly good taste and flavour just waiting to be wheedled out.
 

While I'm looking forward to sampling a fair amount of delicious Shanghainese grub (including the near legendary street food scene), it's an immigrant city, with food from the furthest outposts of the Chinese empire found here. Going for a Chinese is as insane a concept as going for a European, a concept that London at least is close to getting. Depending who you listen to, the 'big four' or 'big eight' regional Chinese cuisines are all represented in the melting pot that is Shanghai and while some, particularly Cantonese, are well understood by the British, there are many that are not.

I had a few people ask slightly bemusedly whether Dr Science and I would be eating absolutely anything (implying dog, stinking tofu, snake, insect, turtle, shark and other contentious eats). While I'm not going out of my way to find it, if it's locally available, not endangered and not just a 'prestige' or 'medicinal' food then I'll give it a try. Stinky tofu is definitely on the list, as are odd body parts, insects and, possibly other things. For the record though, I've ruled out sharks fin and tiger penis (even if I could afford the latter...)

It's going to be an interesting few weeks. Shanghai to Beijing, to Xi'an in the West, then Chengdu and Chongqing in the South West and Guilin further South before heading back to mamma Shanghai. Wish me luck!