One More Shanghai Lunch.

I met a young architect recently who works in Shanghai and his advice to my daughter is "Go north, to Shanghai! SH is at the forefront of the economic boom in China and since she's lucky enough to be in a profession that takes her places, SH is the place!  The city's energy, the thousands of young professionals from all over the world, the upbeat lifestyle, the opportunities...I missed SH in its glory days in the 30s and I'm lucky to be there in its second boom. Tell her not to miss it!"

While I'm not sure about the working life in SH, I'm very sure that there's no shortage of excellent food in that city. Everywhere you turn are bustling restaurants offering hundreds of dishes, making ordering an agonizing decision. In China, forget about Chinese chain restaurants unless you want crappy food. Ditto too, with the little holes-in-the-walls restaurants. Head for air-conditioned modern restaurants where you can eat like a king without risking your mortgage instalments. The quality and variety are reasons why Chinese food is one of the top three cuisines of the world (my  two oldest kids rate it The Best). Look at this lunch in a restaurant on the Pudong side of Wai Tan (The Bund):

First the cold dishes:


A combination plate of cold cut--pork tongue, pork shoulder--in chili oil and garlic.


A spiced aspic of pork.


Another unbelievably delicious dish of tender beef cubes.


Smoked pork slices. Chinese are serious pork lovers.


A tower of vegan imitation duck.


Korfu is Shanghainese style wheat gluten balls. The spongy dough balls were braised in a delicious sauce of soy sauce, wine and spices and each mouthful burst with flavor, taste and bite.

If you aren't still convinced about the food, watch out. The hot dishes:


Mouth-watering mini pork chops, crispy-tender to the bite.


Sandwiched between pillow-soft mini buns.


Another yummy dish of Chinese salted seasoned pork, prawns, duck...It was like a mini poon choi.


A large pot of goodies, like a soupy poon choi, in a delicious soup. Not as luxurious as the Prime Minister's Pot, which is a soup of a whole chicken, a whole fresh pork knuckle and a whole knuckle of ham, but wonderfully delicious (I'm running out of adjectives).


After all the meat, a veg dish is a good change and instead of a boring plate of fried greens, this was a dish of fresh straw mushrooms (one of my fave mushrooms, available in summer in China and HK) and a Shanghai veg, cooked in 'superior' broth.


Stir-fired pea sprouts with some mysterious meat.


Peking duck, delicious beyond words.



I've met many Caucasians who've never eaten duck before and it was love at first bite for them. But there's a bird that tastes even better than duck. It's goose. And for that nobody does it better than the cooks in Hong Kong. I haven't eaten roasted goose in southern China but since roasted goose is a Cantonese dish, they should do it just as good there too. Don't die until you have eaten roasted goose.


Pumpkin puffs.






View from the restaurant of the 'western' side of Wai Tan.

Yihu Restaurant, Shanghai, Part 2

These were the 11 delicious hot dishes we ate at Yihu, after the 10 cold ones:


Steamed fish fillets--very tender and delicate fish but sauce was bland.


Crystal prawns, loved for their tenderness and el dente bite.


The photo says it all. Delicious beyond words.


Baby eels in a rich soy sauce.


Fish maw hot pot, very yum.


Squid in a bean sauce.


Sprouts with 3 kinds of eggs (fresh egg, salted egg and century egg) in superior stock.


Crunchy dish of stir-fried chicken giblets, bamboo shoots and peppers.


Soft and silky fried tofu balls with assorted veg.


Steamed razor clams in a hot chili sauce.


Beancurd strips and Chinese ham, a Shanghainese favorite.

Four types of desserts:


Mini egg tarts. I didn't eat these because I can tell by the color that the custard's not worth eating.


Deep fried flaky radish puffs.


Jiu niang (newly fermented rice) with tang yuen (glutinous balls) and peaches soup.


An excellent dish of baked flaky soft buns with a meat and spring onions filling. One of those things to crave for if you're on death row.

That was a meal of 25 dishes!

Yihu Restaurant, Shanghai

This was a fantastic dinner we had in Shanghai hosted by Hub's cousin HuiLing and his wife Mingtze, who flew in from Windsor, Ontario.

Yihu Restaurant is new and there were some hiccups and mix up with the dishes but generally, the food was great with some improvement needed in the desserts. The portions were smaller than in most restaurants but that's always the case when restaurants go nouvelle. Since there were so many dishes, I'll post the cold ones first. Just looking at the dishes makes me hungry (more so when I'm dieting to loose the weight before I go yet again on another eating spree the second week of December). When I look at the photos and see how many dishes I ate in one week in SH, I still can't believe that I can eat so much. Some of the banquet meals were back to back, lunch and dinner on the same day.


Duck's tongues. I found the flavor too, well, tongue-y.


Deep fried fish in a sticky sweet sauce. Yum.


Anything with Shao xin hua tiao wine is good and chicken feet is crunchy and fun to eat. Especially drunken ones.


Boiled soy beans in Shao xin hua tiao wine. Addictive.


You should recognize this by now. Pumpkin and red dates is a quintessential Shanghainese cold dish.


If ever looks are misleading, this is it because the preserved veg was amazing in flavor. I could eat the whole plate myself. Ohh!


I've forgotten what this was. I think it was lamb ribs.


One of my fave dishes, bean curd sheets with a mushroom stuffing.


A lovely and delicious dish of stir-fried 'golden needles', lily flower buds.



Eel rolls, delicate and tasty.

Louwai Lou, Hangzhou

Westlake's famous restarant, Louwai Lou.

We couldn't find the restaurant on Westlake which a friend had recommended for cheap and good Hangzhou food so we opted for the most famous restaurant on Westlake, Louwai Lou. Louwai Lou is where dignitaries dine when they visit Westlake and photos of President Clinton and other world figures dining in the restaurant are printed on the menu. We were told that we shouldn't miss Hangzhou's most famous dishes: crystal prawns sauteed with tea leaves, beggar's chicken, Tung Po belly pork and Westlake vinegar fish. Since there were just two of us, and we were both still up to our throats with the banquet dinners that we had in Shanghai, we couldn't try all the dishes at one meal. The plan was to leave some of the dishes for dinner, especially the beggar's chicken which we couldn't handle for lunch. We've had crystal prawns with tea leaves before and although it was good, it wasn't something we particularly craved for. I wanted to try the Westlake vinegar fish, to see how it compares with my version, especially since this restaurant is famous for the dish.


Dried fish in Shaoxin wine, a Zhejiang dish my in-laws love. 

The dried fish can be bought in vacuumed packs. I don't like the flavor of preserved meat from the Zhejiang region. The offending flavor is very prevalent in Shanghainese vacuum packed preserved meat such as duck giblets and beef jerky. I wondered what the spices were and found a couple of cloves and a bay leaf among the fish. I don't know what else was in the seasoning but it made me shudder.


Brinjals with prawn roe paste.

I've never eaten a bad brinjal dish in any Chinese restaurants, in China or anywhere else. This one was delicious, as usual.


Tung Po pork. RMB16.80/RM8/USD2.50 per piece.

The first time I was served Tung Po pork was memorable. We were in Hangzhou on a tour 11 years ago. We were each served a covered bowl. When the lid was opened, a brownish square of fat and skin, with hardly any meat, sat in the bowl. We all gasped because we've never seen such a fatty piece of belly pork. Only one guy at our table dug in, and he raptured about it while we looked on, curious and appalled. He had more than two servings and I thought he was going to have a heart attack right at the table. For many years later, I've regretted not eating that piece of fat. When this little bowl was placed in front of me, I actually felt disappointed that the pork wasn't as fatty as the first piece I was served.



But Louwai Lou's Tung Po pork WAS GOOD, so good I could've eaten another bowl if not for my own belly which was overflowing onto my lap. I ate all the fat and the skin, mopping up everything in the bowl with the bun that came with the pork. I missed out 11 years ago and I wasn't going to again this time. Thank you, poet and scholar Tung Po.


Westlake vinegar fish.


Finally, the star of the meal. We chose the gui fish because the price at RMB99/RM50/USD17 per half kg was in-between the price for grouper at RMB198/99/USD32 per half kg and grass carp at RMB69/RM35/USD11 per half kg, something like that.

Hub said a good fish should always be steamed Cantonese style and I had to eat most of this dish myself. I found it very similar in taste to my attempt and if I may, I think my sauce was better because Louwai Lou's sauce was so acrid it choked us. However, they cooked the fish to just the right texture because it was very tender and the flesh was very fine and smooth. Like I've said before, when it comes to cooking fish, timing is most important.

When the bill came, I knew we've been had. The fish alone was RMB119.60/RM60/USD19, meaning that it was 1.3 kg. The fish measured one chopstick long from head to the beginning of the tail, about 25.4 cm/10". I knew from my years of marketing that a delicate fresh water fish of this size can't be that heavy.

Although the food in Louwai Lou was delicious, Hub and I both agree that it wasn't outstandingly so, given the fame and the prices.

Hangzhou's Westlake

The city of Hangzhou, 1 1/2 hours by car from Shanghai, is famed for Westlake (Xi Hu). Westlake conjures romantic scenes of ancient China with its lotus ponds, pagodas, willow trees, mist, bridges and plum blossoms. Look at the description of some of the spots on the lake:





If money's no problem, the best place to stay is in one of those old mansions further into the lake that have been converted into 5-star hotels. The part of the lake nearer to city, where most of the newer hotels are, is not impressive but further away into the other side of the lake, the scenery is beautiful. My first visit to Westlake was in winter and all I remembered of the lake was the mist. On this visit, the mist was replaced by smog.





Hangzhou residents like to gather by the lake and sing Chinese opera.


These tea eggs were bland.


So was the tofu.


Westlake's water is green and murky, shocking for such a famous lake. People were spitting into the lake like it was a sport. I'd hate to be a fish here.


Steamed black glutinous rice.


Black glutinous corn too.

Yes, Marco Polo was here and I am one of those who think that pasta came from China.

The Leifeng Pagoda, one of the famous vista of Westlake.


There are many small gardens and museums in Westlake. This one here is lined with persimmon trees, some of the fruits still hanging. We didn't have the time or energy to visit any of the gardens and just walking around the lake took us 4 hours. Okay, we cheated by taking a buggy ride (which should be banned because the paths were narrow and the buggies were noisy, blaring cheap music instead of honks whenever they needed the pedestrians to step aside) across the lake. You can take the boats too.




Gorgeous translucent jade bowl.


A jade wine cup, usually for royalty and VIPs.


We checked out one of the museums (no entrance fees in Westlake) and the jade objects, as you can see, are beautiful.



It was October 10, 2010 and many couples got married in Westlake because of the rare date and also because the Chinese saying "xie chien xie mei" means perfect. It was also my son Wey's 16th birthday and the first time that I had not been there with him.

Apparently, there are ten scenic spots on Westlake that should not be missed. I didn't know that or I would've planned my walk on the lake to start earlier. There are plenty of good restaurants around the lake. An ideal holiday would be to stay in one of the upscale hotels inside the lake and spend a whole day exploring all the scenic spots, some of which are very historic, dating back to over a thousand years ago. Westlake is beautiful but the development done on the lake does not do the lake its aesthetic justice. I came away wishing that the Chinese would learn some landscape design from the Japanese.