Delongguan's Xiaolongbao - Quality Over Ambience

Continuing on with my look at Shanghai's best-regarded xiaolongbao is Delongguan Dim Sum - it's a local chain with a few branches around Shanghai. These branches tend to top Dianping.com's list of top xiaolongbao restaurants. However the chains don't look like much, and I'm embarrassed to admit that after all my time in Shanghai, and having walked past these places a number of times, this was the first I had ever tried it.

I found Delongguan to be just about the polar opposite of my recently-reviewed Din Tai Fung. While that restaurant's interior felt modern, and the restaurant was heavily staffed by responsive servicemen, Delongguan (on Jiangxi Lu) was a dirty hole in the wall, with cigarette butts on the floor and the kitchen staff sitting around, bored:



So it's probably not the best place to bring the important business client, who would probably prefer Din Tai Fung. I kid - even for a hardened street eater like me, it seemed a little dirty. However, the taste is excellent, much better than Din Tai Fung's. The wrapper was thin, if not extremely thin, and maybe a tad mushy. The vinegar hit was just about the right strength, if nothing fancy. However, the meat filling was excellent and the soup was incredibly flavorful. Here's a look at the xiaolongbao. You can't tell, but it's one normal pork, and the other shrimp:



I also thought it was just about to my tastes - these xiaolongbao are in the running for my favorite Xiaolongbao in Shanghai, against Fuchun's. I'll reserve final judgement until I've tried all the top-ranked xiaolongbao restaurants, but I think any xiaolongbao fan in Shanghai should try both. While I prefer the environment and the wrapper at Fuchun, there's a slight sweetness to the xiaolongbao there, it's not something I particularly care for.

These pictures were taken at the branch on 473 Jiangxi Road, North of the Bund, South of the Suzhou River, and just a couple short blocks West of what becomes Zhapu Lu.

Update 9/1/2009 - This place was recently torn down - here's a Chinese-language list of other Delongguan Restaurants, although none of them are as convenient. I'm most familiar with the branch on 29 Tiyuhui Lu, near the Hongkou Football Stadium and around the corner from the excellent Hunanese restaurant, Guoyuan.

It's all an interesting area, and I'd really advice anyone in Shanghai to stroll the area, and to get a steamer of xiaolongbao while they're at it - although there's a lot of great street food and smaller restaurants in the area. Unfortunately, this restaurant (and the surrounding area) is Chinese only - but saying "xiaolongbao" should get the point across. Here's the menu, they also serve soups and noodles and won-tons (that aren't particularly good).



There's several other branches around Shanghai, none of them particularly convenient. The other ones I've seen are a bit cleaner, though. Here's a picture of the Jiangxi Lu storefront - it's easy to walk past it without giving it a second thought, as I did dozens of times.

Dali's Cangshan Mountains

Dali is an extremely beautiful area - as opposed to the generally polluted, entirely flat, entirely urban Shanghai, Dali is located in a peaceful valley surrounding a lake and overlooked by a Mountain Range, with beautiful blue skies. The mountains come down less than a mile from the heart of Dali Old City - these three pagodas, the most famous landmark of Dali, are basically down the street.

I decided to go on a mountain hike - it was a lot of fun, and I while I don't know if it alone justifies a trip to Dali, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who visits. Like the few other Chinese hikes I've been on, the feel is a lot different than the hikes I've been on in America - where maybe one drives to a parking lot at the bottom of a mountain range, and from there is pretty much on their own. Instead, the actual hike started with a twenty minute long gondola ride, over steep, forested mountains. It's all extremely beautiful:



There's a guide station on the way, and then a path left and right from this point. Again, instead of the cleared-brush paths and foot-worn paths I'm used to from US hikes, this was something more like a sidewalk:



That pictures conveys how flat and smooth the path is, but it takes place on fairly level terrain. However, there's large portions on the trail that happens along the side of enormous cliffs! Even so, there's almost no gradient at all to the trail, one could easily travel on a bike or maybe even a skateboard. I found it truly strange to be going through a rugged mountain range without even having to hike up or down, just sideways. This is about as steep as it got, and it's not as steep as it might look.



As is obvious from above, the path must have been dynamited out of the side of a cliff at points. It went back and forth directly against the mountain, it could feel like cruising the contour lines on a map:



There's even includes the occasional tunnel going through the mountain, here's a dramatic example:



The picture above shows the lake valley peaking out. While there were no dramatic lake vistas in the portion of the hike I went through, the valley occasionally peaked out, it was a beautiful view. Most of the path winded through the mountain range. I was there in December, and even though the weather was about as nice as could be asked for, it still got pretty chilly. Fortunately I missed the clouds coming in, or it would have been worse:



There were also stopping points along the trail, with small sites to be seen. They were just a couple minute's diversion, but interesting. For instance, some small waterfalls:



And there was also a small shack selling drinks and soup, along the side of the pathways. They seemed to have a small home alongside the pathway, from which they raised live chickens and sold fresh meat:



Due to a broken chairlift, I walked my way down the side of the mountain when I was done. The trail conditions were pretty bad and I can't say I recommend this to others. However, it did take me past some farms and an interesting Bai graveyard. The graves stand up above ground, and there's a lot of them on hills that look out over the countryside:

Din Tai Fung - Expensive Xiaolongbao

This is yet another (and certainly not the last) of my great xiaolongbao taste-test. Xiaolongbao is a Shanghai specialty - a simple, delicate, and excellent snack that breaks down to a thin flour wrapper with meat and "soup" inside, dipped in Chinese vinegar.

While so far I've been speaking about the best restaurants in terms of my favorite food website Dianping.com, Din Tai Fung doesn't get particularly high marks on the site - reviews are positive but often lukewarm, with good service and high prices being frequently mentioned. On the other hand, expat site after expat site raves about Din Tai Fung's xiaolongbao, and the always-fun-to-read Christopher St. Cavish, restaurant reviewer for SH Magazine, even named their pork & crab xiaolongbao as the #1 dish to try in Shanghai.

Anyway, it's hard to directly compare this restaurant to say, Jia Jia Tang Bao. While that restaurant amounts to a dive with a line, Din Tai Fung, a Taiwanese chain, feels like an upscale restaurant. It's the type of place you might meet a business person, or do something really serious like that. There's a few branches of the chain throughout Shanghai, they're all in upscale locations, and the Lujiazui branch even has a nice view of the Huangpu River and the local skyscrapers:



They serve a number of dishes from various Chinese styles, with a Hong Kong and a Shanghai slant to what's on offer. Of course the xiaolongbao are the reason I went, and they actually have three versions on offer: standard xiaolongbao, smaller xiaolongbao served in a pork broth, and a xiaolongbao where the insides are a mixture of pork and crab. It's worth mentioning they were all expensive, going for around thirty five kuai an order, with their orders being smaller than what's generally available at other xiaolongbao restaurants. They end up being around ten times more expensive than other places.

But I'm willing to pay $5 for quality, and I didn't let the price bother me for these smaller xiaolongbao. They're about half the size of a normal xiaolongbao, and the idea is to put them in the broth, and then eat them as if a soup. It's enjoyed on a different level than standard xiaolongbao, with the flavors centered off the flavorful, rich, and gingered pork broth absorbed by the xiaolongbao's skin, but I enjoyed them:



But the main event was the xiaolongbao. Initial impressions were good: the vinegar was of the perfect strength, and even had sliced ginger in the dipping dish, the way I remember loving at Oakland's Shanghai Restaurant. It's subtler than one might expect, but gives the vinegar a better flavor:



Additionally, the skin of the xiaolongbao was obviousy very thin and meticulously prepared, while still managing to hold all the soup in. For xiaolongbao fans, the huge amount of folds on top is a thing of beauty:



But it all came crashing down after that. The insides of the xiaolongbao are really nothing at all special: the pork is dry and the soup is flavorless, and in the end the wrapper and the vinegar are mere accompaniments to the meat and the soup. I wasn't convinced the xiaolongbao were any better than that of another Taiwanese chain, the fast food restaurant Yong He Da Wang.

The small xiaolongbao in soup are still excellent, though. And the restaurant is clearly much classier than most any other place with xiaolongbao on the menu. So it might be worth having a look, even if I personally don't plan to ever go again. Also, the restaurant has branches in LA, Toronto, Sydney, and a number of larger cities throughout Asia.

Update 9/1/2009 - I went to the one in Arcadia (a suburb of LA) last year. A little expensive, a little salty, a little parking lot, and the atmosphere is cheap and old, but the xiaolongbao taste exactly the same. Decent xiaolongbao is hard to find in America, so even if I strongly recommend against this place in Shanghai, it's probably worth checking out for someone who happens to find themselves living in or driving through Arcadia.

Zhapu Lu Food Street

This update will be a short break from what I'm guessing will be a long-ish succession of updates about Shanghai food and other parts of China. It's about Zhapu Lu Food Street, an interesting old-time street slightly North of the area touched upon in my earlier updates, on the area North of the Bundand the beautifully filmed "The Post-Modern Life of My Aunt" . This update will feature pretentious black & white photography, because I wanted to try out Lucky, a Cheap Chinese film, and see what it looked like.

Zhapu Lu is directly north of the Bund, very near the waterfront, and in general is one of my favorite places in Shanghai to go for a stroll It can take a bit of digging, but in the nearby area there's a lot of great restaurants, interesting malls, historic buildings, parks, views of the Bund, and so forth - the sign on the right is a bad example, but I kind of like it. These side-streets are also the place to get snacks. Zhapu Lu is a food street, but unlike Shanghai's other food streets, it's almost entirely restaurants. Here's a small snack shack on Sichuan Lu:



The area's restaurants are most visible at the south end of the food street, which is just slightly north of the Suzhou River.



In this area there's also a few illicit massage parlors and "stylists", I didn't get a good picture, but generally they have pink neon lights and a bunch of young women hanging out in their underwear. It's all very much out in the open. These sort of places aren't rare in Shanghai, but to have it on such a main drag strikes me as a little strange.



Alongside the road are some shikumen. These apartment buildings share a lot of common space and don't offer much in the way of privacy, with doors and windows directly against the common footpaths. In a way I felt like I was trespassing - I generally don't like to walk around shikumen even though I think they're very interesting. They're made of brick and it can feel a bit like a claustrophobic maze inside:



See the shikumen and many of these older buildings while you still can, however. While the pace of development is a little slower here than might be expected, and I have to believe a number of the buildings will be protected as historical architecture, it's clear that the beautiful semi-decrepit buildings are being replaced by ugly new ones:



But again, there's a number of older buildings, both large and small, and it's easy to remember that in the 1930s, this was one of the swanker parts of town. Here's an attractive older apartment building, a few blocks North of the main restaurant cluster alongside Zhapu Lu:



As with many other historic older buildings around Shanghai, the city has put up a sign in Chinese and English, explaining a little about the historical significance:



Even the mundane can be interesting. This building has a convenience store on the first story and cheap apartments above, but the art-deco facade, the small statue above the entrance, and the "Li Ming Restaurant" up top, hints that the place must have once been a high-end restaurant:



Really Zhapu Lu isn't very long in itself, and is probably worth visiting for its restaurants, or as part of a larger ramble about the area. As the street goes south of the Bund, it changes names to Huqiu Lu, which is also interesting to walk along. Not only for the Seagull Camera offices & display room just south of the Suzhou River, which I'll talk about sooner or later, but also for the gigantic 30's era buildings:

Stopping to Smell the Flowers in Fuxing Park

I wandered through Fuxing Park today, which I love but haven't visited in far too long - and was very impressed at the rose garden near the Western Entrance. I'll attach a few pictures, and recommend people to make a look-see while they can!

Dali Old City

Much too long ago, I wrote about briefly visiting the city of Kunming, the largest city of Yunnan, a province in South-Western China. While I liked the city, I was only there for a half-day before continuing on to Dali.

Dali is a city dominated by the local tourist industry. That sounds like a terrible place to visit, but actually the city was fun, and anyway it largely functioned as a jumping-off point to visiting other sites in the area. There's also a "new" city - while I only drove past city, it looked like any other third-tier Chinese city one might see.

I arrived in the morning, and walked to my hotel down the main tourist drag, Fuzhou Lu, all the buildings were restaurants or net cafes or fruit vendors or convenience stores, the sort of things useful to a tourist. There were no cars, there were trees along the road, and there was even a very small stream along the side of the road. All in all about as pleasant as a main tourist drag can get:



In kind of a strange contrast, a lot of these tourist shops still looked like the traditional buildings, re-purposed for tourists. It didn't come off as gimmicky or fake, just as the natural product of a tourist boom so sudden that nobody thought to tear everything down:



Wandering off the main streets, there were still a lot of private houses of an older style:



Additionally, the city walls had been re-built, and the city was punctuated by a number of pagodas and so forth, the were all lit up at night:



Really surprisingly, this city was probably the biggest backpacker haven I've seen out of Europe - yeah I did a Eurotrip when I was in college. A lot of the travelers were continuing on to Tibet, or were traveling around throughout Yunnan. While I visited a little off season, there was still a very wide range of youth hostels, bars, cafes, and the stereotypes of what a young Western youth might like:



Unfortunately I didn't take a picture which conveys that the Western food in Dali was awesome - cheaper, and generally much better that what is to be found in Shanghai. Many of the foreign-oriented places served as some sort of mash-up of hotel-bar-restaurant-cafe. The local food was also surprisingly good. Here's a local specialty, cross-the-bridge noodles. There's a hot broth, and then the noodles and various ingredients, each served in individual plates, are dumped into the broth and allowed to cook there for several minutes. The fruit on the top plate was for eating after the meal:



While I enjoyed Dali on its own, it's overshadowed by the surrounding area. I'll have a few related updates in the next month or two. It's also worth saying that staying here is cheap - there were a number of decent hotels and youth hostels in the $5-$10 range.