Sour Grapes

The one thing Yangshuo has a lot of is banana pancakes. Hippies and banana pancakes. Almost every “western” restaurant in the city has the identical menu, which is a blessing to some, and a curse to everyone else. While abstaining from a comprehensive review of the local western food scene we can safely say that if you want burgers, pizza, passable French or American-Italian food you need look no further. For those wishing to look past the backpacker diet, the town and surrounding area is well worth a visit from a local-food point of view. There’s no lack of Chinese restaurants, look for snails, either alone or stuffed with pork and of course the local beer fish.

Another regional specialty is rice noodles (mi fen, 米粉), either fried or more often served in soup with a variety of toppings (picture above), at the very least some pickled vegetables and a bit of pork, maybe even a few snails (tian luo, 田螺) if you want. It’s the local fast food and about 4 rmb/bowl depending on your toppings. I had it almost every day for breakfast, bar a few lapses into the realm of the banana pancakes and some roast pork baozi. Be forewarned that although the local palate is not necessarily into spicy, when they ask you if you can “chi la” they mean it. You can find these at many stalls around town, starting about 7:00am.
Another popular dish is sandpot congee. Now I’m not a big congee fan, rice gruel is usually pretty boring, but a variety of restaurants, many near the food market (see below), offered this. Look for large tables covered in small bubbling sand pots which you then personalise with a selection of other dishes.

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Ok. It may not be “the best”. But for the price you’re paying this place is damn good. It’s got the comfort food quotient even if it doesn’t live up to your last dinner at Bellagio. Anyhow, I’ve decided to post about it because we’ve just ordered it AGAIN for the 100,000th time and I’ve never posted anything about them. Plus, the owner is a Chinese/Canadian lady from Burnaby BC, and she’s super friendly, so we want to give her some props. Mark, over at likealocal.cn, has posted a nice report on them and the history behind the name which is worth checking out, as is his blog in general (if it is indeed going to be updated more than once every month? hint hint!).

So, what you’re going to want to order is the deep fried mozzarella sticks (#123, 10¥). The rest of the deep fried apps aren’t bad per-se, but the mozza sticks are definitely the cake. There’s also assorted Chinese cold dishes like stewed beef, stewed egg, cuke salad etc… but we havn’t bothered trying them because that would mean not ordering the mozza sticks which is out of the question. [nb: after having read the likealocal.cn column comments I do have to admit that occasionally (but rarely of late) the mozza sticks come empty, their contents oozed into the fryer. It is a shame when this happens, perhaps management can look into this?]

Now that we’ve your app taken care of we can move on to the mains, where you’ll be ordering the carrot-noodle with cheese [stuffed] beef balls and spice tomato sauce (#321, 22¥) which lives up to it’s delicious sounding name. Egg noodle with chicken in spices and fennel sauce (better known as da-pan-ji, # 316, 16 ¥) isn’t bad either, nor is the carrot-noodle with asparagus, carbonara sauce (#317, 18¥). Egg noodle with chicken and sesame sauce (#311, 12¥) isn’t heavy on the chicken but is nice and saucy, and #315 with carrot and beef brisket is worthy as well. The cold noodle dishes are well priced and very tasty, and the juices or smoothies are also well worth the price (about 8¥), although the drink portions aren’t massive. Do avoid the #324 (lamb ribs/chops w noodles), lamb is for the Xinjiangren or the Europeans to make, I don’t know what I was thinking ordering that!

The only problem is you’re going to have to go to the store to get a delivery menu. Unless I post one as a picture below. Which would be nice and and really really cool of me. Ok. See below. But if you use this I’d ask you to post some comments, because otherwise we don’t feel the love.

-Laokele menu side 1

-Laokele menu side 2

Is it worth the drive to Minhang?

Recently opened in that strange nether region that is expat Minhang, right next to a Starbucks and a Stone Cold Creamery, in the general orbit of the American School.

Due to a mix up on behalf of those in our party doing the ordering we spent the night eating entirely from the appetizer menu. Nothing wrong with that except that it limited our experience. The food is somewhere in the American bar food/soul food/tex mex area. It was, bar one minor missteps, very well made. Kelly Lee, the chef, runs a tight ship and does a damn fine job. The décor is nice, aiming for that high-end chain resto aesthetic to help the “locals” feel at home. It succeeds and the place both looks good and was packed.

The other “allure” of the place is beer, brought to you by Gary of the now and rightly defunct “Henry’s”, that empty airplane hangar of a brewpub just off the Bund. In the past I’ve found this man’s beer expensive and passable at best. An experience with a raspberry flavoured brew at the old Henry’s tasted as if someone had tipped low-grade raspberry flavouring into a vat of cheap beer. We’d also had a distasteful and discourteous run in with the man himself, which I won’t go into, and they had strange happy hours, like mid-morning on Tuesday and such. Ok, not that strange but it seemed as if I always missed them, which meant that the beer was overpriced for what it was. [We were just talking about it, again, last night and if they’d had bands, a cheap bar food style menu, and more drinks specials I think Henry’s could have rocked, but WTF do I know] In any case, this time around there were I believe 3 choices: a pilsner, a pale ale, and a dark. The pilsner was actually quite good, crisply bitter, refreshing. The dark was watery with a good start and a weak finish. The staff had a great big “Happy hour 2 for 1” sign above the bar that they hastily erased when someone noticed it about half-way through the meal. Shameful.

So on to the food. Fried okra came in a light cornmeal batter with tasty mayonnaise based dipping sauce. If you like okra you’ll love these. If you don’t like okra, well you won’t be ordering them. Pulled pork quesadillas were damn fine as well, a nice fresh tomato salsa on the side. “Sliders” those mini-burgers of delight, were delightful. With a nice dob of what we took for onion jam, they came accompanied by a strange creamy sauce that we were later to learn was “beer cheese sauce”. Herein lies my only gripe of the night. It would pass as a beer-béchamel but otherwise there’s nowhere near enough cheese in that sauce. And when you serve “cheese” fries and they come slathered in this sauce, and you serve queso fundido, and it too relies on this sauce for its “cheese” component… well I smell trouble and it ain’t the cheesy kind. The fries themselves were good, thick cut, just meaty enough. The queso fundido came with freshly fried corn chips, and once we worked through the top layer of the aforementioned sauce and found the ground up pieces of sausage-meat in the bottom of the dipping cup we were happy, but the joy of the fundido is the ooey gooey stringy greasy cheesiness of it and using a cream-based cheese sauce, well, for me that’s aint queso fundido. Although once the sauce is improved it will be damn tasty. Buffalo wings, not steroid-plump, were great with just the right amount of spice, a textbook perfect blue cheese dip and the requisite crudités. To finish, superb strawberry shortcake that should be ordered at all costs. If the wait staff tells you they’re sold out, tell them to go downstairs and ask again.

So is it worth the drive to the middle of nowhere? That’s a tough one, if we had a driver I’d say sure, otherwise it’s damn far. But, if you’re in Minhang, heaven forbid you might live there, then it’s going to be a new favourite. Do yourselves a favour and order more than just appetizers, the short ribs beckoned to us on the way out, alas we were stuffed. As to prices I didn’t see the bill but it wasn’t cheap. We ended up paying just shy of 200rmb per person although we did consume quite a bit.

For another perspective, and a more flattering take on Gary’s beer, check out Jarrett Wrisley’s blog-post about Boxing Cat on his Shanghai food blog Chewed up and Spit Out.
Boxing Cat Brewery

From Peoples Square that’s 75 rmb in a taxi, or go from the Songhong lu metro station and take a taxi for about half that.

453 Jinfeng Lu,
Minhang, near Baole Lu, 6221-9661
金丰路453号
近保乐路

Now that the tomatoes in Shanghai are moving slowly towards ripeness it’s time for salads. It’s also time for tomato sandwiches and as we all know the best part of a tomato sandwich is the mayonnaise, followed closely by the black pepper. With that in mind here’s a wee salad that can be made in a jiff, using that slightly addictive Kewpi red-label mayonnaise.

For 2 hungry people, or 4 people who know how to eat reasonably with other dishes:
3 medium tomatoes, washed, cored and sliced in 1 cm slices.
Lay these on a plate and sprinkle them with a touch of salt and a touch of sugar.
Make a dressing using:

1 clove or garlic that you’ve minced and crushed to a pulp with a solid pinch of salt

2 Tbsp of red-label mayonnaise

anywhere from a half to a full tsp of freshly ground pepper

scant 1/2 Tbsp of cidre vinegar (or any other salad worthy vinegar)

Mix it all up. Taste it. Adjust it if necessary. Pour it over the tomatoes.

Owners of the world’s slowest elevator, thankfully the food here is worth the wait. What’s more, the place is squeaky clean and the service is great; the kind of Chinese service where it’s almost too much (”No, I can put the napkin on my lap by myself thanks.”). The word Shanghai in the name of the place is a bit of a token gesture, the menu is very Cantonese, and, while not biblical in thickness, what they do they seem to do well.

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Out of a perverted sense of “adventure” S brought home a bottle of Greatwall, one of China’s more predominant local white wines. Total price 22RMB, or about $3 CAD/USD, from the mini-mart across the street. I think the most appealing aspects of this wine are the nose and the colour. It smells a lot better than it tastes. The smell is actually appealing, fresh, “wine-like”. The colour is mildly golden, like an un-oaked chardonnay. The taste, and I’ve found this with many Chinese made white wines, is like they’re trying to create a rice-wine flavour out of a grape based wine. That sort of thin, sherry-like, mustiness, with a wooded taste that could pass for being mildly corked. An emphasis on the top-notes with a wateriness thereafter. The back label lists the grape used as chardonnay.

Ultimately this wine is just bad. It gave me a mild headache and we left the remainder of the bottle after a glass and a bit each. I doubt we’ll be finishing it, even for cooking…

For a more recent tasting of some higher end local wines, check out this post at the Grape Wall of China blog. Interesting as well is the breakdown of why wines are so expensive in China. As I’ve said before, definitely a blog to watch.

The little known region of Guizhou is one of China’s most impoverished provinces. Home to a large population of ethnic minorities and sandwiched between Sichuan and Hunan it’s not surprising that they’re also reputed to have some of the spiciest food in China. Thanks to Michael from SmartShanghai we rediscovered Lao Tan. It may not be the spiciest but it’s still quite tasty, especially those deep fried dumplings in tomato sauce!! See more pictures and a description of the dishes……. Read the rest of this entry »

Here we are again at Sweet Dynasty, a branch of the HK based resto located next to Crystal Jade in the basement of the HK New World Plaza on Huaihai rd. It’s not that it’s spectacular but they offer a nicely priced fix of Canto-style food and they have some of the best iced milk-tea in Shanghai… wow does that milk tea get me going!! Sean likes the iced Honolulu coffee.

To start we had some Char Kuay Teow noodles. Sweet Dynasty has the (some might say) nasty habit of putting curry powder in their “Singapore-style” noodles.. it’s ok, I can deal. These arn’t bad noodles, a bit too greasy but there’s a fair amount of shrimp in there and the wok hay is pretty much in effect.

Probably the overriding reason I visit here, apart from the milk tea, is the cheung fan or raw rice rolls. Great cheung fan are so hard to come by and Sweet Dynasty’s are by no means perfection, but they have 6 or 7 different stuffings to choose from (pig liver? no thanks!), this time we had char siu (roast pork) and beef with mushrooms (I think, needed nore orange peel in the filling).

A foray off out of our usual ordering field led to eggplant stuffed with shrimp paste in black bean sauce, in the picture it looks kind of gross but it was actually quite good although I could have dealt with some more black bean in my sauce, a bit less intense that we would have liked.

What we didn’t have this time, and something that I’ve gushed about before on this blog, are the spring rolls. I havn’t had them in a while but they’re pretty textbook perfect, impossibly crispy followed by a little goo in the filling. The rest of the dim sum is worth ordering although the har gow can be a bit MSG heavy. Another stand by for me are the Cantonese style egg noodles in soup although the last time I had one the portion size had mysteriously shrunk. Dessert soups are perhaps the raison d’etre of Sweet Dynasty, so if you dig the warm seasame soups or icy tofu with fruit, and all that stuff then knock yourself out. I’m not really a sugar person.

All in all count about 150¥ for 2 with a beverage each. That usually gives us enough food with a bit extra to take home.

Trick entrances definitely have a little mini-vogue going on in Shanghai. The bar People’s 7 is actually the only other place I can think of, but if two does not a mini-vogue make I don’t know what does. Apart from that the decor at JC is impressive without being tasteful. It definitely has a bit of a James Bond “villain’s lair” feel about it; mini sharks swim above blue-velvet upholstered banquettes, which are actually superbly comfortable and large and worth trying to snag. To bad they don’t have a show where they feed the sharks, or maybe an aquarium ayi who swims about squeegying overhead as you dine, anyhow. The drinks list isn’t exceptional but there were a few bottles of red, a few white, some sake, shochu, a smattering of mixed drinks, and the prerequisite Chinese hooch. Not extensive, just enough.

Food wise however the place was a bit hit and miss. The menu has a brief fusion section, as well as a selection of sushi and sashimi, the rest of the choices being pan-Chinese. Read the rest of this entry »

The search for passable dim sum continues…

Fu Lin Xuan has multiple outlets in the city including one in Superbrand Mall. The setting is upscale Cantonese, with an illustrated English language menu of their dim sum offerings.

My one biggest gripe about this place is the quantity of MSG used. The siu mai are not bad but they set my tongue tingling, ditto for the sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf. Har cheung has fresh shrimp but the wrapping is overly thick and soft, *sigh*. The standout was a shrimp and vegetable dumpling with a har gow style skin, a nice plump shrimp surrounded in green veg, light and flavourful. Pidan zhou (preserved egg congee) was chocked full of egg, not my cup of tea but pangzi enjoyed it. Wu gok (taro puff) was overcooked, with a slightly tough shell, not enough feathery. From previous visits a dish of shrimp baked in crispy pastry is definitely worth repeating.

It’s not bad dim sum. It’s just not super good.

150Y for 2

2F Hong Kong New World Tower, 300 Huaihai Zhong lu (6372-1777)