Whampoa Club, Shanghai

The Bund from Pudong
The Bund (the low-rise, illuminated buildings across the river) from the Hyatt in Pudong

Having spent decades energetically trying to purge itself of any traces of its colonial and pre-colonial past, Shanghai had a turnabout just in time for the 2010 Expo. Two years ago, there wasn’t a tree to be seen in the city; today, most of the main streets are lined with thousands of plane trees which all look to be about 20 years old. It’s amazing what you can do with a command economy; there was, it seems, a forest of the things somewhere inland which have been carefully uprooted and planted wholesale along Shanghai’s bare roadsides. We visited the Jing’an temple, the original building long obliterated but now being newly rebuilt for tourists and worshippers (in approximately that order), the finishing touches being installed as we walked around by artisans. The core of the old city, by the Yu Yuan gardens and the City God temple, has been sanitised and rebuilt in antique style, all carefully paved with concrete and lined with tourist information booths, resulting in a sterilised pedestrian precinct clad in red lacquer and glossy varnished wood.

Chinese chess
Chinese chess in one of the unimproved back streets

It all feels very disjointed. You’ll still find pockets of the old city in there (the streets around the pedestrianised area are untouched, the Yu Yuan gardens are gloriously crumbly and the City God temple, despite a restoration about five years ago, feels much less Disney than the surrounding area), and areas like the French Concession keep much of their colonial atmosphere. Best of all, though, for those looking for colonial Shanghai, is the Bund.

Whampoa Club lobby
Whampoa Club lobby

Until a couple of years ago, the arc of neo-classical and deco buildings curving alongside the Huangpu river wasn’t somewhere you’d want to walk, with an eleven-lane road eating up the space where the promenade gardens used to be, a huge flyover blocking much of the view and a large concrete bridge. Miraculously, the whole thing has been swept clean – the road narrowed, the flyover pushed into a tunnel, the bridge demolished – and the promenade is now open again for the first time in decades. It’s heaving with people, especially at sunset, when the view of the lights over sci-fi modern Pudong contrasts so extravagantly (and really rather wonderfully) with the classical sweep of the Bund. Rents are high here, so the Bund is packed with luxury goods shops and some of the city’s pricier restaurants. We were celebrating, so we headed for the Whampoa Club,  in the gorgeous surroundings of 3 the Bund. You’ll find classical Shanghai cuisine here (fifteen pages of it) alongside regional specialities from other parts of China, in a lavishly decorated space dense with lacquer, gold leaf and bronze – and the inevitable wall of awards.

We were here to sample some traditional Shanghai dishes, and ordered the Legendary Su Dong Po Braised Pork: fat, braised belly in a sweet, glossy red bean and soy sauce. It’s a fatty dish, but the many hours of braising result in cubes of tender, intensely savoury pork, the fat carrying the velvety flavour to every corner of the mouth.

The atmosphere can’t be beaten. What I thought was a piped recording of extraordinarily delicate Chinese music turned out to be sound drifting from two ladies with a flute and a dulcimer in the corridor leading to the restaurant entrance. And part-way through the meal, an oddly magical power cut left us  illuminated by candles glinting off the chandelier in the centre of the room and the weird glow of Pudong slanting through the window. “This,” said Dr W, “Is a super-romance-peak-experience.”

Shanghai "smoked" pomfret
Shanghai "smoked" pomfret

Smoked Old-Fashioned Shanghaianese Pomfret is a Shanghai cuisine A-lister. It comes in bite-sized pieces, fried crisp with a caramelised coating and more sweet, soy-based sauce. It’s another classical dish, and the name is misleading; the fish itself is never actually smoked, but is cooked in a wok of fuming oil. A dish of gai lan (mustard greens) in XO sauce made in-house, thick with wind-dried scallops and pork, offered a respite from all the protein and fat – just as well, because we’d also ordered a Beijing duck.

Portions at the Whampoa club are huge – this is probably somewhere you’re best off visiting in a large group if you want to sample more from the long menu – and we’d already eaten a lot, so we passed on the stir-fried meat of the duck, just concentrating on the skin in little egg crepes. In texture, the skin was very different from what we’d eaten in Beijing (and much more traditional – I’ve never seen the puffy, popcorny skin at Da Dong replicated anywhere else). Molten fat gushed from under the skin as it was carved by the table. The skin on this duck was less crisp than the specially prepared skin at Da Dong, but ultimately rather better tasting, presumably because of the lubrication from all that fat. The duck sauce was also more up my alley, with a strong taste of rice wine and a dark sweetness.

"Clearing sputum" tea
"Clearing sputum" tea

We drank very pricey medicinal tea from the lengthy tea menu, in an attempt to clear our heads of the accumulated smog and traffic fumes from a few days in Beijing. “Clearing Sputum” tea does not have a pretty name, but it’s a beautiful drink; dark apricot in colour, with notes of orange, camphor and osmanthus. I am not at all sure it worked, but nothing ventured and all that. Tsing Tao beer, on the other hand, worked splendidly to do that thing that beer does.

The menu is available in English, and while not all the members of the very attentive staff speak English, you’ll find that a little miming, pointing and smiling go a long way. If this fails, there’s always someone on the staff who does speak the language, so you won’t get stuck. We didn’t get as far as dessert; the other dishes were in that space where things taste so good you can’t stop eating even though you are bloatedly, lumpishly full. We were, and we couldn’t.

The duck and the tea were both on the pricey end of the menu, and we’d drunk several beers; the eventual bill of RMB 900 (£90) is a hideous price for much of China but pretty much what you’d expect at one of the restaurants on the Bund. And do you know what? It was worth every penny.

Nan Xiang dumplings, Shanghai

Xiao long bao
Xiao long bao

Xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, are an emblematic piece of Shanghai cuisine. They’re a testament to the chef’s skill – ideally, the dumpling will have a thin, thin skin which gives instantly to the teeth, but still has enough integrity to hold in a spoonful of soup alongside the dense pork filling. That soup doesn’t appear until the dumplings are cooked; it’s created when a jellied stock, which is solid when cold, is mixed in with the meat filling, melting with the heat from steaming.

There’s a bit of etiquette involved in eating a Xiao long bao. Pick the bun up by the “knot” on the top with your chopsticks, dip it in the black vinegar and shredded ginger mixture on your table, and place the bun in your little spoon. Use chopsticks or teeth to make a little hole in the side of the bao, allowing the rich soup to leak out into the spoon. Eat the dumpling (carefully – if cooked properly, it should be hot enough to fetch the skin off your tongue) and slurp the soup from the spoon.

Xiao long bao are available all over the city, and some are much, much better than others on offer. I had some surprisingly good ones alongside some surprisingly bad ones at the surprisingly grotty Hilton (unfortunately, while they’d turned out enjoyable, if somewhat MSG-tacular dumplings for a couple of days, they screwed up on our last morning and the few I had there for breakfast on our last day turned out to be tepid, resulting in an 11-hour flight spent developing a close relationship with the airline toilet. Learn the lesson I didn’t – don’t eat a tepid dumpling).

Queues of locals snaking out of a restaurant are a great sign. If you’re visiting the People’s Square or the excellent Shanghai Museum, head for Jia Jia Tan Bao – you’ll spot the restaurant long before you get there from its queue. My favourites were the dumplings at Nan Xiang (sometimes transliterated as Nanxiang), probably Shanghai’s most celebrated dumpling stop.

Dumpling chefs
Dumpling chefs at Nan Xiang

Nan Xiang is an institution that the city is so proud of that a canteen-style branch has been set up at the 2010 Expo, in the middle of a very satisfying food court arrangement. It’s well worth locating if you’re visiting the 5.28 square kilometres that make up the largest ever world’s fair – you’ll need the fat, carbs and protein to get you to the other end.

In the city proper, you’ll find Nan Xiang near the Yu Yuan gardens in the Old Town God’s Temple precinct. No matter when you visit, there will be a queue. Check whether the queue you have joined is for the take-out window or for the restaurant itself, which is upstairs. As you work your way higher and higher up in the restaurant, you’ll find the offerings on the menu become more complicated, so we queued for the third floor, where crab-roe buns are the speciality. If you’re not too fussed about crab roe and just want to sample the pork buns, stop at the second floor, from which you’ll get a great view of the zig-zag Jiuqu bridge.

There are photographs of the dishes on the wall you’ll be queuing alongside, which is helpful in the face of the eccentric English menu (the buns are referred to as “characteristic dessert” – they’re characteristic, but they’re sure as hell not dessert). We ended up with a big steamer full of the traditional pork buns, some crab roe, vegetable and tofu parcels deep-fried to a marvellous lightness (the menu calls these spring rolls), and a plate of superb baked rice-flour and sesame buns filled with cashew nut and garlic chives, all flavoured with a rich sauce.  Someone at an adjacent table was wrestling with a giant, fist-sized bun full of crab roe and pork with a straw sticking out of the top to suck the soup out with, which convenience left him howling as it precision-poached his soft palate. Exercise caution with hot substances and straws.

You’ll find yourself paying RMB 15 (about £1.50) per bamboo steamer. Plus the air fare, of course. If you’re in London and find you simply can’t manage without a plate of xiao long bao, head for Leong’s Legends in Chinatown’s Macclesfield St – they’re no Nan Xiang, but they make the best I’ve found yet in the UK.

Da Dong Roast Duck, Beijing

Duck preparation area
Duck preparation area - these ducks have been steamed but are not yet roasted. Note koi river.

Chain restaurants occupy a very different place in the foodie ecosystem in China. Here in the West, chains tend to be reliably mediocre (or worse), only worth visiting if you’re away from home and have a particular hankering for that very specific and very homogeneous pizza/burger/pasta thing that they do in the branch round the corner from your house.

In China, though, you’ll find chains (smaller than your average UK effort, but chains nonetheless) like Da Dong Roast Duck and Nan Xiang dumplings (more on them later this week) where the number of branches is an advertisement for the popularity and excellence of the cooking, not a sign of bland uniformity. Several people had suggested Da Dong to me (I’m afraid there’s no English website), so I asked the hotel concierge which branch he recommended, and ended up at the newest, at Jinbao Place in the Dongcheng district.

Jinbao Place is one of those glistening, insanely swanky shopping malls, all Gucci and Burberry, where an emergency shirt to replace the one you’ve spilled hot and sour soup down just before a meeting (this actually happened to one of the people we were travelling with) will cost you RMB 2000, or £200. The whole of the fourth floor is taken up by Da Dong, with its koi stream running through the restaurant, around an open duck prep area; its Scandinavian-style interior decorations; and an awful lot of polished black granite. Despite all the gloss, we only paid RMB 600 (£60) for a battleship-sinking amount of food and an awful lot of beer – this is pricey for Beijing, but the food is so much more interesting than anything you’ll find at home, I’m sure you can wear it.

Menus are printed in English. There’s a very expensive seafood section full of abalone, lobster, sea cucumber and other premium ingredients, where exquisitely photographed pictures of each dish accompany each description, alongside a much more affordable section of traditional Beijing dishes, without photos. We ordered mostly from the non-photo section – and we steered clear of the oxtail soup with a dirty great seahorse (a creature on the Red List of endangered species) bobbing up and down in it. A colleague did order a seahorse by accident at another restaurant without an English menu, and said it was a lot like eating an ear.

At the moment, Euro/American molecular techniques are pretty fashionable in Beijing, so our little starter plates of wind dried ham with tiny sweet peas, quite different from a Western pea with their thin skins and intense sugary flavour, came delicately arranged on a spoon, all accompanied by a frothy little shot glass of something that appeared to be minty mouthwash. A palate cleanser? Whatever it was meant to be, it was a little alarming and a very curious choice of flavour next to those glorious little peas, but it was oh-so-pretty that I feel like letting them off. You can just make out some tea being poured in the background – there’s a long and involved tea menu, and it’s well worth your while exploring something other than the bog-standard jasmine tea.

Braised aubergine
Braised aubergine

Some peeled prawns, deep-fried in batter then simmered in a garlicky sauce, which was soaked up by the softened batter, were curious texture-wise, but that limp batter created an incredible vehicle for the flavour of the sauce. A Kilner jar of pork chops, cooked according to a “mystery technique”, was threaded through with sugar cane and grilled over charcoal, then snipped into bite-sized bits with scissors at the table – and was so heavy on the  MSG that we got through our glasses of beer very quickly, and needed a top-up for the teapot. Add a really superb braised aubergine, gorgeously dense with thick, sweet soy and aromatic with anise and garlic; and a dish of gai lan (mustard greens) stir-fried with ginger, and we were pretty much full – but it remains my firm belief that everybody has a separate stomach for dessert, and it’s my enormous genetic good luck to be blessed with yet another stomach just for roast duck in pancakes. (I managed to put weight on at a rate of about a pound a day while we were in China, and spent the next week in Hungary – long story – running up and down hills to try to burn it all off, so be warned: gorging yourself like this doesn’t come without consequences.)

Roast duck
Roast duck

The duck at Da Dong is the main event. They claim to have invented a technique whereby the duck is much leaner than other Beijing roast ducks – the skin here is popcorn-puffy and exceptionally crisp and dry, while the flesh remains moist and juicy. Peering into the dark duck prep area, which was manned by chefs in toques and anti-sneeze facemasks (see the picture at the top of the page), I could make out that the ducks were being steamed or boiled in a purpose-built-something that looked like a small well in the middle of the room, then hung on racks before being cooked until a glorious gold in wood-fired ovens.

Duck condiments
Duck condiments

The duck is carved tableside, and you’re given the halved head (full of curdy brains and covered with crisp skin), sans beak, to chew and suck on – which I did, to Dr W’s great displeasure. Your first pancake is assembled for you, after which you’re left on your own with a heap of pancakes, two little pitta-ish buns, and dish of condiments – sugar, a duck sauce, pickled ginger, pickled vegetables, crushed garlic, spring onions, radish and cucumbers. You can do what you like with these, but do try a sliver of skin dipped into the granulated sugar – surprisingly, abominably good. A pallid soup also accompanies the duck, but it’s eminently missable. This wasn’t the only Beijing roast duck I ate in our week in China, and there’s definitely something to that technique – the duck is much less fatty and exceptionally crisp, which appears to be more palatable to Western tastes. The accompanying duck sauce wasn’t the best I’ve had – full-on sweet, a little bitter and without the fragrance of fermented soy and rice wine I’d been hoping for – but this seems a minor quibble alongside that shatteringly crisp skin.

A complementary fruit plate arrives at the end to cleanse you of ducky thoughts. It sits on top of a gushing dish of dry ice, which doesn’t make it taste any nicer, but is awfully good fun to look at.

Once we’d finished looking at fruit, we waddled, duck-wise, down past the shops full of diamonds and branded leather and collapsed into a taxi. A great evening, but given my waistline, it’s a restaurant I’m glad that I have to travel 11 hours to get to. One of the branches of Da Dong is definitely worth the visit if you’re in the city.

Beijing

A quick and dirty picture post today; having spend the weekend doing the tourist thing, I’m spending the day battling with Beijing tailors, braving traditional foot massages and eating congee while Dr W is whisked around a dairy and a pharmaceutical company. (Rather him than me.) We’re staying at the gargantuan (it’s the largest Marriott outside the US) and very plushy Marriott City Wall, which has a superb Chinese restaurant charging prices which seem more London than Beijing, where I’ve been gorging on dim sum. I’m on the hunt for the perfect Beijing duck, which, if everything works out and I manage to avoid accidentally booking one of those cultural show places with no Chinese people in it, I’ll post about later in the week.

Incidentally, if you’re one of my Twitter followers, you’ll find me uncharacteristically quiet this week. The Great Firewall blocks access to Twitter (and to every Twitter client I’ve tried), so I’m not able to update.

Photography is tricky here in the city, because of the smog which hangs over the city and does very peculiar things to the light – it’s useless trying to take pictures with any depth of field because the haze turns everything yellow and blurred. Here, anyway, are three holiday snaps to keep you entertained until I can write about some of the eating we’re doing.

Inside the Forbidden City
Inside the Forbidden City
Forbidden City doorway

 

Great Wall
Great Wall